Welcome home, and good news, if you can hear this, you made it through Friday the 13th.
This is Audio EXP for the 14th of October, and the episode title is “A Dead Channel”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #214]
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Scoundrel Game Labs is in the Spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.
I’m talking to Scoundrel, who are super helpful, and I hope to get round one of the Q&A back this week. Often, there’s a round two, sometimes a round three, but it all depends on how slam-dunk my questions have been.
A story Bronwen wrote up this week was CD Projekt Red using an AI to put a deceased actor’s voice into Cyberpunk 2077.
Of course, if you’ve seen any of the latest Star Wars movies, then you know the voices of dead actors are only the surface of what the tech makes possible. The CD Projekt Red story and the use of Respeecher are interesting because the tech is becoming almost mundane these days.
That’s precisely why actors are on strike in America right now. They worry they’ll all be redundant.
I’m not a lawyer, but I believe the EU, and perhaps the UK if we kept that law, make it easy to copyright your face.
The idea of actors selling their likenesses to movies raises the idea of actors being added to films based on their star value, which of course, happens already. Still, it may turn actors into nothing but influencers who curate public opinion and keep their likeness desirable.
Did you catch The Creator while it was in the cinema? There was a whole thing about people selling their likeness to robots. It’s all very cyberpunk, which, of course, takes us back to Cyberpunk 2077.
This is the future the Pondsmith and Gibson warned us about. Except, the future is fluid. There’s an opening comment in William Gibson’s Neuromancer that stays with me because it was powerful and yet a whole generation of readers won’t get it.
Gibson wrote;
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
That grey snow fuzz of a dead channel is unknown to anyone who grew up in the digital TV era.
Having reflected on how hard it is to predict the future let’s try that. Let’s talk about Halloween trends for 2023.
I went through the predictions of Fun.com’s sister site HalloweenCostumes.com, and they are certain that Barbie costumes will be big this year.
It’s hard to disagree.
That said, Ken is only third top for men, and after anything video game with Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and, Five Nights at Freddy’s with particular focus.
The top Halloween idea for men, though, is just Horror movies, and I suspect that’s a bit damning.
More interesting, though, are the top themes which are;
- Families/Groups
- Inclusive (Adaptive, Plus Size, Tall, Baby Carrier, Wagon Cover)
- Pets (Food, Animals, Dinosaurs, Disney Sidekicks, Occupational, Horror)
- Decor (Giant decor, especially skeletons)
Halloween is very expensive, isn’t it? Expense and if skeletons are as popular as HalloweenCostumes.com predicts then antomy too.
Funnily enough, Guide Strats sent through details on The Anatomy of an Average Steam Gamer.
That’s expensive, too, with the average value of a Steam collection coming in at $2,800.
The Danish play the most and the Indians the least. Surprisingly, Brits play a little more than Americans, but Germans play even more and Canadians slightly less.
I suspect I can resist, it’s been a while since I’ve bought a computer game. I am often tempted by books, which brings me to Forbidden Planet.
There are two Forbidden Planet retailers, both named after the movie, and one is called Forbidden Planet International, and the other is the retail arm of Titan Books. Or, perhaps more accurately and wisely, the geeky shop is also owned by the same people who own Titan Books, Titan Comics and Titan Manga.
What caught my attention this week was an Uber Deluxe and Limited Edition of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.
These books are signed by Neil Gaiman and have a limited edition art print by and signed by Monet Alyssa. They’re £100 each, and I’m not going to claim to be an expert collector, but that seems like great value to me.
I think this is more unusual, and that’s that Forbidden Planet says they have an exclusive edition of a roleplaying game. They’ve been stocking Cubicle 7 books for a while now, and maybe it’s just a copy-paste issue, but they say they’ve an exclusive Doctors & Daleks edition.
That’s the 5e version of the Doctor Who RPG. Forbidden Planet has an exclusive slipcase for the game. It’s a good deal for them, absolutely their demographic, but an awkward one for Cubicle 7 to manage as it undervalues fans’ efforts to buy directly from the publisher.
Another interesting e-commerce proposition is Cave of Monsters’ Elements of Procedure tabletop RPG that’s based on Sapphire and Steel.
Firstly, I need to somehow watch Sapphire and Steel in detail. Previously, it ran in the breaks of my student days RPG weekends, and I didn’t pay enough attention.
Secondly, Cave of Monster Games are selling limited risographs for their game through Itch. Itch doesn’t support physical products, so Cave of Monsters Games seems to be offering people the chance to spend more on a digital copy and then get into correspondence with them about collecting the physical prints.
Those are two exciting propositions, the limited edition Doctors & Daleks and Elements of Prodecure, but my standout this week is Ritual from Hive Mind Games.
Ritual is a solo RPG in which you will complete a rite based on real-world occult beliefs. Yeah, I imagine the red tops and religious right will go nuts if they hear about this.
Hive Mind Games are up for publicity, and I know this because I interviewed Josh a co-founder.
It’s Josh who confirmed to me that the ritual players will learn is influenced by their magickal understanding and will, they think, get people more interested in the occult.
Ritual hits Kickstarter later this month, and you can watch Geek Native for details. As ever, you can find links in the show notes.
Outside Ritual, but not outside the Satanic Panic, a new D&D book is coming. The first of the Fallbacks series is called Bound for Ruin, and it’s a D&D novel.
It’s also published by a Penguin Random House company, the same group we talked about last week as being cut from the distribution logistics. It’s a reminder that publishing and distribution are different, if related, things.
Before we talk about bundles which are appropriately Halloween-themed themed I want to bring up my surprise for the second Big Heckin’ Two-Day Prime Day sale of the year.
Firstly, we remarked on how Prime Day was actually two days. Secondly, Amazon threw us a curveball and had a second Prime Day sale this year.
My surprise was that D&D was included. That didn’t happen earlier. If books are best sellers, then you don’t need to discount them. If people are buying books at full price, then the need to discount them is also diminished.
That’s why I think it’s interesting D&D was in the sale this October. Of course, a new nearly-but-not-edition of D&D is due out next year, but do people new to D&D who need the core rules and official hardbacks know that?
Or, as I want to do, am I overthinking it? Does Amazon add things to Prime Day based on an algorithm for the last 30 days of sales whim?
In bundles, the Bundle of Holding is doing a horror series for October. We’ve got the OSR of Best Left Buried by SoulMuppet Publishing and a game where PCs are dungeon crawlers called Cryptdiggers and likely to die.
There are also horror adventures from The Arcane Library. The head librarian is Kelsey Dionne, who wrote Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse, which happens to be the highest-rated adventure to date at the DMsGuild.
Lastly, there’s the Pop Culture Horror ebook bundle at Fanatical which gets you hundreds of bucks of reading for just bucks and if you enter the code GeekNativeFan10, which humpack capitals, you’ll get a further discount.
On that note, keep safe, ignore that shadow watching you, and see you next week.
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