The holidays have really messed up our schedule, but we took out some time to talk about The Last Jedi. Do you want to know what we thought of it? Listen to what we thought about it!
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Thanks for listening!
2018-01-02 22:58:00 +0000 UTC View PostHello! Thank you for supporting this podcast and us. We got together to talk about the things that we liked in 2017. It's a fun time! We talk about a lot of stuff, and there's no list because it's a SURPRISE!
2018-01-02 22:53:46 +0000 UTC View PostI FORGOT TO WRITE DOWN THE DISCUSSION TOPICS THIS TIME.
WE SPEND A LONG TIME TALKING ABOUT DESTINY 2.
2017-12-12 02:21:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis is our new newsletter. Are you excited to read it?
Sorry for the long delay! The holidays delayed us a little, but I promise that it’s worth it.
CMRN’s Part
I’ve recently gotten into the world of Playstation 2 emulation, and I’m excited to attempt some Streamed Content over the next few weeks based on that emulation. I played quite a bit of Minority Report: Ever...
2017-12-12 02:17:21 +0000 UTC View PostHello!
CMRN here. I have had one of the busiest months in my entire life! So I don't have much Excellent Newsletter Content for you. Luckily, Danni has a great review for you below. I will give you all the really good words next time.
Please accept episodes 36 and 37 of Mages and Murderdads as a consolation p...
We talk about:
DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN NEW TRAILER
SHADOW OF WAR (POLYGON PIECE, 2017-11-08 23:40:55 +0000 UTC View Post
I forgot to write down all the things we talk about! Here are some I remember:
PUMPKINHEAD
IT
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
DRIZZT DOURDEN
FIRST LAW TRILOGY
THE STEEL REMAINS
SHADOWRUN RETURNS
DAVE ARNESON
OTHER THINGS I CANNOT REMEMBER
Hello! Here is this month’s newsletter!
10 Quick Names for NPCs in your Tabletop Game
1. Pem Glenwing
2. Score “Hammer” Mantle
3. Parity-With-Scorn Herring
4. Sam Sandwich
5. Ellenwyn Thimble
6. Calypso Hogwash
7. Anama Le
8. Corn
9. Hail Olwyn
10. Skerring Polfish
Notes From CMRN During The Month of September
I’ve spent a lot of time watching 2017-10-03 02:39:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Wow! This is the first Ranged Touch podcast. A sampling of stuff that we talk about is below:
To the Finland Station
The Dark Elf Trilogy
Lucifer comics + Sandman comics
The Unwritten
The Girl With All The Gifts
All The Light They Cannot See
First Law Trilogy
Frasier
Cheers
The Walking Dead
Arrested Development
Dark Souls
Just Cause 3
Eternal
Tacoma
XCOM
Conan Exiles
Destiny 2
Grand Theft Auto 5
Tacoma
Hello! Here is this month’s newsletter.
Four NPCs for Any Inn
1. Pepper the Golden Elf
You see an elf of medium height who appears to be gilded in the shiniest gold. His name is Pepper, and he’s been living in this inn for the past two years. He makes a decent living allowing people to gawk at him or touch him, but there is a sadness in his golden eyes that is unmistakable. The inn’s bodyguards perk up when people get near pepper...
2017-09-01 17:36:19 +0000 UTC View PostHello all!
I hope that you are doing well. I've just posted the May essays, one on the video game Pool Nation and the other on a collection of science fiction biographies, and I think those will be my last essays for a while.
I've struggled with this Patreon going up and down for the last little while, and after some conversations with Danni (the cohost of Mages & Murderdads), I have come to the decision that I will be focusing the content here toward what we have done with M&MD ...
2017-06-05 18:08:14 +0000 UTC View PostI stumbled on Hell's Cartographers in the strangest way. I was looking for some book about speculation, and I discovered that the library catalog system has something akin to a science fiction criticism designation. It was all essay collections from authors (Samuel Delaney was well represented), and amidst all of the predictable pieces I saw a grey spine with a title glued to it. I don't know what happened to this book ...
2017-06-05 18:00:28 +0000 UTC View PostI've never been a "pool person." I've played it a few times, for sure, and recently I probably played a dozen games of it over the course of a three day period. Pool has the same mystery for me that bowling does. Like the ability to make a quarter disappear, a person's ability to excel at these games seems to hide inside of them.
If you see a professional runner, or a tennis player, or a football player, you can tell. Those sports run rough shod over the human body, and they change their playe...
2017-06-05 17:59:42 +0000 UTC View PostWhoa! Last month was probably one of the most busy of the last few years of my life! I got married! I traveled to various places! I didn't get as much work done as I would like!
That also means that I didn't get the two essays finished for this month! I did get one finished on how Battlefield 1 tells its story, and I made that available a minute ago for $5 subscribers. For everyone else, you just get something extra next month. Big apologies about that! Good stuff to come.
If you're a su...
2017-05-02 15:38:42 +0000 UTC View Post
I've slowly (very slowly) been working my way through Battlefield 1's campaign over the past couple weeks after having exclusively playing its multiplayer mode in the past, and I have to say that I'm both puzzled by how the game tells its story and how reviewers of the game viewed that storytelling method.
Battlefield 1 goes for the anthology format across the various theaters of a vaguely-historical World War 1. You spend a little time as an Italian, some more a...
2017-05-02 15:31:15 +0000 UTC View PostWow! Thanks for bearing with me over the past couple days -- I've been profoundly busy, and it took me an extra couple days to polish off the essays for this month.
The $3 essay is on a mission in Modern Warfare Remastered that I think does really interesting and cool work. The $5 essay is a short reading of the Philip K. Dick novel Eye In The Sky, which is the most wonderful criticism of ideology I think I've ever read. I hope you enjoy both of them!
On the video front...
2017-04-03 22:18:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Eye in the Sky is a Philip K. Dick novel about worlds. Like much of Dick's fiction, the novel is concerned about how we come to know the conditions of the world around us. Eye cleaves close to a formula that Dick liked to use very often: a group of people are brought into proximity with one another, and forces beyond their control put them into psychic connection with one another. Like in Ubik or A Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky is about how t...
2017-04-03 22:12:31 +0000 UTC View Post
I've recently been making my way (slowly) through the "remaster" of Modern Warfare. It's a weird romp of a time, and one gets the feeling while playing through it that there were two ideas of what this game should be.
One was an idea that this would be a way to bring a legendary game into the hands of newly-twenty-somethings who had never played it before. If you remember playing that game when it came out originally: congratulations, you are old. An entire generation of ...
2017-04-03 22:11:32 +0000 UTC View PostWhoa hell I have been profoundly busy, but things are trucking here on the Patreon. Last month's posts went up today (I foolishly messed up my calendar).
The $3 post is about Crusader Kings II and what kind of person it wants you to be.
The $5 post is about the novel The Shining.
Mages & Murderdads keeps on trucking in a great way, and we did an excellent (if I may say so) interview with Phil Daigle...
2017-03-01 23:34:38 +0000 UTC View PostI recently re-read The Shining after reading Doctor Sleep, and I was struck by two things: it really might be one of the best American novels of the 20th century; it hinges on a moment of annihilation.
The film of The Shining follows Jack Torrance's slow dissolution by the Overlook Hotel (and then what he does to his family after he is fully di...
2017-03-01 23:31:09 +0000 UTC View Post
I've taken a deep dive into Crusader Kings 2 for an article that I'm working on, and I've been way into trying to unite the Kingdom of Wales into a powerhouse of violence and prosperity during the earliest parts of the Middle Ages. It's really hard, and I've failed every single time over my six or seven playthroughs, but I feel like I'm getting closer.
What's struck me about these games is that how they play with history. The characters that exist in the time per...
2017-03-01 23:30:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Roger Caillois is mostly known in game studies as the guy who created the typology of games. Within his four types, each resting on a scale of pure play to pure rules, he created a matrix of understanding how people played. Along the way, he tried to figure out what play really is, and that typology is interesting in that it brings in the play of being another person: mimesis, reproduction, and for Caillois it meant taking on a role.
But what ga...
2017-01-29 16:16:00 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a lot of talk in game design about how to make people feel things.
For the Skinner Box people, the ones who are trying to psychologically dial in exactly how good it should feel to win a match of a competitive card game you play on your phone, you do it through stimulus. You click the button, and it lights up just right. When you open your box of loot that you got from winning way too many games, it shakes in just the right way. But if y...
2017-01-29 16:14:59 +0000 UTC View PostHello!
I've been so incredibly busy this past month! Danni and I have been making more Mages and Murderdads episodes, and I've continued to post our Let's Play of ...
2016-09-08 23:11:32 +0000 UTC View PostHello!
I hope that all of you are doing well. Sorry for the delay on this post -- I am in the middle of reading for the comprehensive exams of my PhD, and I have been jam-packed with things to do for the past couple months.
Sorry that there isn't a PLAYER//KNOWLEDGE video this month! I'm a little short of the funding mark that makes it mandatory, and I have had SO MANY OTHER THINGS going on that it's been hard to keep up! But never fear! If you like P//K, it is coming back soon. 2016-08-14 00:55:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-07-31 23:59:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Wow! Hello!
It's been a weird early summer for me, and there wasn't an update last month! Oh no! But in reality that is a-okay. You can watch this video I made about the design of Overwatch, or you can watch my new John Warcraft series, or you can listen to my new p...
2016-07-05 18:59:02 +0000 UTC View PostThank you so much for the support this month!
2016-06-30 23:59:00 +0000 UTC View PostThank you so much for the support this month!
2016-05-31 23:59:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello everyone!
Player/Knowledge is a little late this month due to some unforeseen problems, but we're back with a shorter video that goes into some small pieces of Hitman Absolution that I think are worth...thinking...about.
My current Cities Skylines let's play is going to be finishing up next week, and a Civilization V let's play will start. It will be the same Chill Content that you have always known and loved!
Thanks so much for your support! Hope you have a great...
2016-05-12 17:36:17 +0000 UTC View Post