film

Film Review: Golden Bat (1966)

When looking at the 1966 Golden Bat film, it’s interesting to see how much it innovates – if not outright invents – in the realm of cinematic hero tokusatsu. The main hero – Ogun Bat (Golden Bat) is widely credited as basically being the first 20th-century superhero, with characters from DC having parallel evolution in the US – his cinematic counterpart innovates considerably more then he invents, but those innovations are nothing to sneeze at.

Continue reading
Standard
Role Playing Games

I Am Running A Tabletop Game!

I will be running a Tabletop campaign! For Real Humans! Who I’m Not Related To!

Starting next month I will be running a D&D 5E campaign for some friends, playing through Dragonlance: Shadows of the Dragon Queen. I’m not livestreaming it, and I’m not going to be giving the players names, but I will be giving some after-action reports here, since I haven’t run a game in a while, especially not for people who aren’t in my family.

Standard

Blaine joins us again for a discussion of Bubblegum Crisis, along with the tabletop RPG.

Anime Explorations Episode 23: Bubblegum Crisis

Blaine joins us again for a discussion of Bubblegum Crisis, along with the tabletop RPG. Bubblegum Crisis is available for Streaming on Plex, Retrocrush, Pluto.Tv, and Peacock The series is also available on physical media through the Crunchyroll Store (Affiliate Link): https://crunchyrollstore.sjv.io/c/1395613/1941463/20100 Next month we are discussing Moyashimon Moyashimon is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

Continue reading
Books

Book Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett puts a bit of weirdness into the urban fantasy genre. It’s not urban – not even close – it’s a very pastoral story. It’s not contemporary, being set in the 1800s. However, it’s definitely not heroic fantasy or horror, and certainly fits more into some elements of urban fantasy than it does to the other subgenres I’m familiar with. It’s also very enjoyable.

Continue reading
Standard
Anime

Anime Review – Texhnolyze

So, the second of the anime series on my New Year’s Resolution list that I’m done with is one I’m dropping – Texhnolyze. I did give it a reasonable try – getting about a cour through the series before I had enough, and because I had the show on my resolution list, I do feel it’s important to talk about why this series failed for me when two other Chiaki Konaka projects – Serial Experiments Lain and The Big O – were fine.

Continue reading
Standard