Audio EXP Podcast: #248 – Is ranting better value for money than a Comic Con?

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 13th of July, and the episode title is “Is ranting better value for money than a Comic Con? “

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #248]
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The OG GM Adventures won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.

I emailed The OG GM, but not that long ago. We’re halfway through the month, so I should have been faster, and we’ll have to hope for a quick response. Yikes.

Hey, in my defence, at least it adds a bit of jeopardy to the monthly ritual of the RPG Publisher Spotlight!

This week saw Bronwen’s 500th post on Geek Native.

Bronwen joined me in running the blog and the sister sites just over a year ago, so this is impressive. To mark the occasion, Bronwen put together a compilation of favourite posts and man of these where we got a full blast of opinions.

I rather liked that. For example, I suggested Bronwen watch Attack on Titan even thought she’s cautiously new to anime. What can I say? In at the deep end seems to work here and we got several posts about it. By the way, Scotland Loves Anime is sneaking up on us again.

Bronwen Winter Phoenix is an artist, so you can imagine what her opinion on generative AI is when it comes to art and so the candid post on the possible AI uprising was a fun read and then we have both barrels of opinion with Picard in the Nexus and thoughts on The Dark Tower.

Those are highlights of highlights, and if you have thoughts on the sort of content you like from Geek Native, you can always let us know.

Perhaps it was this 500 posts look back that inspired it or perhaps it was the on-going conversation about it online but Bronwen also blogged about why people are getting upset about cgi dragons.

This is a House of the Dragon post, which I have not seen, but I’ve scanned Bronwen’s post. To me, it seems as if storytelling is a powerful medium. What are the chances?

We’re not the only people forthright with our opinions this week. David Glanzer, the strategy officer of Comic-Con International, the company that runs WonderCon, San Diego Comic Con and others, talked about Hotelocapylse.

The Hotelocapylse is the nightmare of San Diego hotel price hikes for SDCC. Those hotels that play nice lose out, and SDCC are getting fed up. Their contract with the city runs out next year, so they could pick a different city and move there.

That would, I imagine, be a branding challenge, but it’s not impossible as I can recall a time when not having an E3 felt impossible, and now we don’t have an E3. I remember cons threatening to quit red states with religious laws and winning some concessions.

I almost didn’t book UK Games Expo next year, but I found a sale and got tickets for a different, cheaper hotel and am currently worrying whether my credit card can take the strain.

That’s the inspiration of the podcast episode title, by the way, as it seems it’s much cheaper to have insightful or strong opinions and then cathartic to blog about them than it is to splash for a briefly expensive hotel and go to a convention. Oh well.

For example, I found myself ranting a bit about the Royal Mail this week and it felt good. What did the Royal Mail do to deserve this?

They’re now taking pre-orders on D&D 50th anniversary stamps. They’re different from the ones in the US, and feature heroes and monsters, but they reminded me of the dreadful Horizons scandal here in the UK in which the company sent innocent people to Court and piled on with lawyers rather than admit to IT problems and other bad PR.

Still, it’s pretty cool that D&D is getting a stamp set. I like to think of well-to-do stamp collectors with leather-bound books featuring stamps of kings and queens and now, beside them, an owlbear and beholder.

Since we’re talking about D&D’s 50, let me admit that I’m speculating on whether Wizards of the Coast will try to sell off the original 5e books on Amazon Prime Day. That’s the 16th and 17th of this month. The D&D 2024 books are now on pre-order there, and some D&D models are already on sale.

I’ve started a D&D Prime Day megathread to track it, which will include anything TTRPG related and already has Troll Lord’s 5e sale added.

This week, I also got to talk to Vortex Verlag’s Melina Sedo about 5e and going to Hell and back.

Vortex Verlag’s published The Straight Way Lost, a 5e book that starts in a fantasy Renaissance Italy and winds a path to Hell. Now there’s something of a sequel and I get the feeling it’s more of a horror.

You can read the interview of the blog.

Of course, this week has had its fair share of geeky news outside the TTRPG space. I was delighted when Gunship dropped another track, with a music video and it was an anime. You can watch Doom Dance now and it features a favourite of mine, Carpenter Brut.

The Doom Dance anime is Gunship’s tribute to 80s anime, which they call the golden age. I’ve fond memories of a young me in the 80s trying to get hold of anime back when it was frightfully hard to do in the UK. I get why Gunship call it the golden age, but I also question it. In many ways, we’re living through the golden age right now.

Whoops. Ranting again.

While I was pleased to find Doom Dance, Bronwen put a huge amount of effort in to write up Crunchyroll’s 2024 summer schedule. Check it out.

I’m most tempted by Tasuketsu, a survival anime where half the population disappears each night, Tower of God season two because season one was good, and Quality Assurance in Another World simply because I’ve never known a QA person in real life who wasn’t great and because of the derpy monsters on the key visual.

I speculate we could get Bronwen interested in Theatre of Darkness because she’s a horror fan.

In more traditional but perhaps more surprising trailers, Disney has not cancelled the WandaVison spin-off Agatha All Along and it looks interesting.

Kathryn Hahn, who plays Agatha, will rock it and of course Aubrey Plaza is great but I hope her character isn’t too much like some of the visions in Legion.

Lastly, but certainly not worth skipping over, there’s a RuneQuest bundle on Humble. That’s a fantasy Bronze Age RPG from Call of Cthulhu makers Chaosium.

On that note, enjoy your rants, pick your hotels wisely, and see you next week.