December 2023 Newsletter

As the classic song says, "It's beginning to look a lot like December" which must mean you're on course for an ALL NEW Ranged Touch monthly newsletter! What did we accomplish last month, and what exciting surprises are in store for the future? Well sit your butt down in this jolly sleigh and embark with us on a ride through Ranged Touch's snow-capped hinterlands.

On Game Studies Study Buddies, we have continued with THE WINTER OF CHILDREN by diving into Josef Nguyen's The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy. A straightforward episode with some compelling case studies to talk about, Nguyen basically gives four examples from the past decade demonstrating how the emergence of digital culture and its alignment with youth and their "creativity" are the training grounds for the current vertiginous era of gigwork and neoliberal self-discipline. Bet you didn't think logging into Instagram was doing THAT to you, huh??? Anyway, you can grab the book yourself on our Bookshop page, as well as next month's title, Mizuko Ito's Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software.

Meanwhile, Just King Things inched closer to the Dark Tower with Wizard and Glass, Steve's bizarre fantasy cowboy doomed romance epic that, though beloved by many in the larger King readerverse, is also notorious for the full-on brakes it applies to the actual plot. CMRN is not terribly impressed but has some good things to say, and Michael hates it. Both honchos are more similarly baffled in the bonus episode, on the Marvel Comics adaptation of Wizard and Glass (plus more), The Dark Tower: Beginnings, which shoehorns in a lot of bizarre tangents about giant spider dudes and magic orbs that are also ladies with snake hair and things of that nature. For December, they'll be reading the gothic ghost mystery Bag of Bones, while the bonus episode will be a "winter feast" aided by Theresa Carle-Sanders's Stephen King-inspired cookbook, Castle Rock Kitchen.

In another part of the bookstore, the part where Shelved By Genre happens, Michael, CMRN, and Austin this month worked through the second and third chunks of The Citadel of the Autarch, meaning next month they'll close it out and end Book of the New Sun proper before starting in on its controversial "coda" volume, The Urth of the New Sun. There's a lot of discussion of theology and the degree to which aliens or sufficiently advanced robots might count as angels in our past, and also, in our future??? But if numbers are more your thing, you should check out the very warmly received SBG bonus episode on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, which is a weird as hell document in and of itself but the perfect place to go if you want to know how many pieces of gold a flying snake with a genius-level intellect can carry. We also had another bonus ep, where we talked about the fascinating science fantasy roguelike Caves of Qud with one of its creators, Jason Grinblat, and discussed narrative design, literary influences, and gems. And it would be remiss not to point out our bonus episodes AND the main SBG episodes are handled by lovely producer Jordan Mallory, who also manages our extensive foley team.

And there you have it! That's all the goings-on for November, so as the calendar pages continue to fly by in some sort of montage, you'll have plenty of stuff to listen to now and in the future. Thank you so much for checking out Ranged Touch, for supporting us here on Patreon (if that's your thing), and if you're scrambling for some last-minute holiday gifts for that indoor kid in your life, remember: we have a t-shirt store.