Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing: October, 2022

Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing: October, 2022

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So….the last three weeks I’ve shared what I’ve been watching; what I’ve been listening to; and what I’ve been reading. Let’s go for the grand slam and I’ll mention what I’ve been playing this year.

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My Nord Guardian, who uses a bow and has a kick-butt bear to handle the melee.

I never jumped full-bore into the MMO world. I preferred CRPGs, like Dark Sun, Baldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter Nights. I gave Pathfinder: Kingmaker a long try (gets bogged down in the details – like food management). And the first two Mount and Blades ate up a lot of time.

I did Guild Wars 2, and Rift, short trials. Lord of the Rings Online and Neverwinter Nights have both gotten a fair amount of play, though the Turbine Engine is definitely dated. I love the lore in LotRO.

Age of Conan was my favorite MMO until last year. I like the graphics, and once I got used to the fighting system, it worked. The Conan lore is TERRIFIC. And since I’m a huge Robert E. Howard fan, the setting was my favorite (even more than Middle Earth). I’ve played several characters and classes, and they all were fun. Since I usually solo, the paucity of players wasn’t a problem. (Age of Conan doesn’t even come up on MMO’s ‘Active Player Count List, which goes down to number 63: 8,163. Not many folks around, if that matters to you.)

I played a ton of Morrowind when it came out, and was a big fan. But I didn’t go on to Skyrim, or Oblivion. Just wasn’t interested. I had picked up Elder Scrolls Online during a Steam sale, and made a half-hearted attempt at it a couple years ago. It looked nice, and it was fine. But I wasn’t invested in the world, and Age of Conan remained my go-to MMO.

Last year I did a deep play with a Kajiit Nightblade/Rogue and LOVED it. And I reinstalled it late this summer and I’m rolling through it with a Nord Guardian, using a bow and a bear. ESO is an amazing MMO. The visuals are still great. It’s a beautiful game. The combat system is easy to use, and the skill trees underlying it give lots of options on how you want to build your character.

The lore of Tamriel is simply staggering. The depth is immense. There are books all over the game that you can read (or not) and add to the reality and the history of the setting. There are collectible lore books (there’s a quest) that go in your Lore Library, and you can read them any time. And they don’t take up inventory slots! Not all books are collectible. There are over 1,000 readable books! That is cool.

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The Haunted Mansion: A Halloween Re-View

The Haunted Mansion: A Halloween Re-View

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I love spooky, Halloween fun, type films, especially those with ghosts and haunted houses. I watch them all year long, but there’s something special about watching them in October. I’m not keen on gory, dead teenagers, blood-fest flicks. There’s no amount of money in the world that would entice me to watch the Saw franchise, no matter how well written, acted, and edited. I’m not putting them down; they’re just not for me. Which means that come October, I’m more likely to look to Disney than Netflix for viewing ideas.

I recently re-watched The Haunted Mansion. My only previous viewing was when it came out in theaters in 2003.

Promotional copy for the movie says,

Here’s the fright-filled comedy adventure loaded with hair-raising laughs and eye-popping special effects! Eddie Murphy stars as a real estate agent whose family comes face-to-face with 999 grim, grinning ghosts in the creepy old Gracey Manor!

I don’t know if there are actually 999 ghosts in the film, but there are a lot. They hit the whole range of emotions, including the silly barbershop quartet singing graveyard busts, the wise-cracking Jennifer Tilly who plays the psychic trapped inside her own magic ball, and the briefly-scary zombies in the family crypt, to name just a few.

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Goth Chick News: AMC’s Interview with the Vampire Brings a Classic Novel Back from the Dead

Goth Chick News: AMC’s Interview with the Vampire Brings a Classic Novel Back from the Dead

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To say I have a lot of feels about what I’m about to tell you is an understatement.

Author Anne Rice, who passed away from complications of a stroke last December at age 80, had been a large part of my life for a very long time. I, like so many, fell in love with her first novel, Interview with the Vampire back in high school. From there I devoured all of her vampire and witch novels, buying each one in multiple formats. Because of Rice I took my first trip to New Orleans where much of these novels are set and where Rice herself lived at the time, in an antebellum mansion in the Garden District.

I fell as hard for NOLA as I did for Rice’s books and to this day I travel there several times a year to soak in atmosphere as dense and timeless as the immortals she wrote about. Throughout these years I came to have a nodding acquaintance with Rice herself, first seeing her at each of her book signings, and finally landing an annual invitation to attend her “Vampire Ball” held in NOLA each October. We didn’t hang out or anything, but she did call me by name and take time to chat each time we met.

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Some Tales from Night’s Plutonian Shore: My Favorite Edgar Allan Poe Stories

Some Tales from Night’s Plutonian Shore: My Favorite Edgar Allan Poe Stories

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I do not have a precise memory of when I first read one of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales. Perhaps it was a bowdlerized version of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” perhaps “Some Words With a Mummy” in one of my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest omnibuses. It might have been the Classic Comics version of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I definitely saw most of the Roger Corman movie adaptations with Vincent Price on the 4:30 Movie on ABC. I know I picked up a copy of Scholastic Book’s collection, Eight Tales of Terror, at a used book sale at Our Lady of Good Counsel. The important thing is, Edgar Allan Poe‘s creations have been with me as a reader of the weird and the fantastic from my earliest days.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve actually read any of Poe’s stories, so, as the Halloween season is upon us, it seems the proper time to return to them. I had no doubt I would still enjoy them, but I really had no idea just how good and groundbreaking they really are. Lovecraft, in his seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” stated that by focusing on the psychological and not the Gothic, “Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror.” I don’t think it’s an overstatement. There are few boogeymen or vampires here; instead, it’s mostly warped and broken minds, the sadism of the vengeful, and the nightmares of the delirious.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is credited with creating the detective story (he didn’t), the modern short story (he was one of the earliest American practitioners of the form), and contemporary horror fiction (he helped). His life was plagued by misfortune and missteps and to this day, his death at the unfortunate young age of forty remains a mystery, though it has been attributed to alcoholism, drug addiction, syphilis, and even murder. Whatever the circumstances of his life, his work remains one of the pinnacles of American writing, of Romanticism, and of weird fiction.

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Random Reviews: “The Problem with Reproducible Bugs” by Marie DesJardin

Random Reviews: “The Problem with Reproducible Bugs” by Marie DesJardin

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Cover by David A. Hardy
Cover by David A. Hardy

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week, I rolled 28,223 which turned out to be Marie DesJardin’s short story “The Problem with Reproducible Bugs.”

One of the things I’m hoping to get out of this series, from a person point of view, is to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I’m also hoping to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

Authors frequently introduce protagonists who are suffering from amnesia, or don’t know where they are, who they are, or what is happening to help provide an entry point for the reader, who often has to have those things explained in a science fiction story. In Marie DesJardin’s story “The Problem with Reproducible Bugs,” Vince’s inability to remember what is going on it central to the point of the story.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Barbarian Boom Part 6

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Barbarian Boom Part 6

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Amazons (1986)

By late 1986, the Barbarian Boom was well into its deliberate self-parody phase — and all the better for it, frankly. If nothing else, self-parody is inexpensive, and if you have a rock-bottom budget anyway you might as well aim for something that’s within reach. Though the spate of barbarian films in the Eighties is beloved by fantasy nerds of a certain age, as we’ve seen in our previous instalments in this series, very few of them hold up to a contemporary rewatch. Thus, it’s a pleasure this week to cover two movies we can actually recommend! To prepare yourself properly, practice your “Hur hur hur!” ahead of time so you can laugh like a real barbarian.

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The Most Ambitious SF Novel of 2021: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

The Most Ambitious SF Novel of 2021: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

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The Actual Star (Harper Voyager reprint edition, August 16, 2022). Cover art by Monica Byrne

The trick to really staying on top of the best SF and fantasy, I’ve found, is to take the time to find a handful of excellent reviewers, and trust what they tell you. I’ve discovered over long years that Rich Horton is one of the most reliable and discerning readers out there, and this is what he posted on Facebook three days ago.

I just finished reading (via listening to) The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne. I don’t think it’s perfect, but I will say it is way more ambitious than any other 2021 SF novel I’ve read, and I strongly think it deserved a Hugo nomination.

By strange coincidence, I’d just picked up a copy of the Harper Voyager paperback reprint of The Actual Star, and had a copy to hand. See how fate works for you when you let it?

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What I’ve Been Reading: September, 2022

What I’ve Been Reading: September, 2022

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So, I talked about what I’ve been watching. And then I followed that up with what I’ve been listening to. So naturally, this week it’s what I’ve been reading. Though, I considered a post on what I’ve been playing, as I loaded up a couple Diablo-style point and click games.

Another summer of A (Black) Gat in the Hand has come and gone, and I was deep into pulp and hardboiled goodness. Here’s a list of all the essays; we will hit the 100 mark next summer!

In my second installment of Back Porch Pulp, I talked about The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run; also known as The Cleveland Torso Murderer. I have long been a fan of this strange chapter in Eliot Ness’ latter career. Starting in 1935, a madman (or possibly more than one) killed a dozen people in Cleveland, dismembering their corpses. The murders suddenly stopped in 1938, and the killer was never identified. There were additional killings, including in Pennsylvania and New York, that may have been by the same person.

Cleveland was about to host the Republican National Convention, and famed Untouchable Eliot Ness was the city’s Public Safety Director. Along with Jack the Ripper, and Austin’s Servant Girl Annihilator, I find this to be an absolutely fascinating serial killer case. He was never identified, and only one man was officially charged in the killings. He was almost certainly innocent, and was found hung in his cell.

I have books by James Badal, Stephen Nickel, Max Allen Collins, John Barlow Martin; novels by Collins, and William Bernhardt; and even a graphic novel. A fellow Sherlockian, Daniel Stashower, just released a new book about it last month. I think it’s an absolutely fascinating subject, even though it’s largely forgotten outside of Cleveland. If you’re into true crime, you should definitely dig into it.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of British SF 1 and 2 edited by Mike Ashley

Vintage Treasures: The Best of British SF 1 and 2 edited by Mike Ashley

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The Best of British SF 1 and 2 (Orbit, 1977). Covers by Bob Layzell

Every once in a while I sit back, take stock of our accomplishments, and think, “Man. We’ve showcased countless forgotten writers here at Black Gate, discussed tens of thousands of neglected books, writing late into the night on tight deadlines, and nobody has spell checked anything.”

Still, I’m justifiably proud of what we’ve accomplished in the 23 years this website has been live. Though I do have to admit that we have been, like the market at large, over-focused on American publishing. So I was delighted to find the massive two-volume anthology The Best of British SF 1 and 2, published as paperback originals by Orbit in 1977.

Containing nearly 800 pages of short fiction from Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, John Russell Fearn, Eric Frank Russell, Arthur C. Clarke, John Christopher, John Brunner, E. C. Tubb, Brian W. Aldiss, James White, Bob Shaw, Philip E. High, Colin Kapp, Kingsley Amis, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Keith Roberts, and many others — all interspersed with insightful genre history and commentary from editor Mike Ashley — these books are a wonderful retrospective of the finest science fiction from across the pond.

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Quatro-Decadal Review: Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1989, edited by Gardner Dozois

Quatro-Decadal Review: Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1989, edited by Gardner Dozois

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An unappealing cover by Wayne Barlowe, more on that in a second

After the somewhat uninspiring November 1989 Analog, I turned next to Asimov’s, and found it to be pretty good.

Editorial — “Half Done” by Isaac Asimov

Starting with the quote ‘Half done is hardly begun,’ Isaac Asimov (That’s Dr. Asimov, if you’re nasty) jumps into looking at how we conceptualize and compare time. Starting with the fact the Earth is 15 billion years old, half of that is 7.5 billion years, before our solar system existed by easily 3 billion years. Earth itself comes into play 4.6 billion years ago., and half of that, 2.3 billion Earth life is just prokaryotes. At 1.4 eukaryotic cells start showing up. Half of that, 700 million years ago, the highest life is just worms, nothing that even has shells.

The exercise is to show how rapidly things start to change. Leading to the question of how long can it go on? How do we get off on setting stories in the future. On thinking we can even realistically do it?

While reading this essay I could not shake the knowledge that Asimov had four years of life left.

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