A Green Mushroom

I liked the Cosmere Collection a lot, but it's not going to be for most people.  The Cosmere is the greater interconnected universe that Brandon Sanderson has slowly been building in the background of a lot of his novels and novellas.  He's mentioned that they're all connected and only recently have some of the connections been mentioned in the text of his work. This is a short story collection all about that.  It's a series of short stories and novellas from his various worlds in the Cosmere. Some of them are brand new for this collection and some of them I've read before as stand-alones.  But, they're all good. If you've read the majority of Sanderson's work then you owe it to yourself to pick up this Cosmere Collection.  If you haven't read any of his work or only a few books then definitely skip this one for the moment and keep it in mind for later. But for the Sanderson fans out there, this one is great!

Mini Topic Grab Bag In this episode: We get so many comments and questions from you guys that we wanted to take this opportunity to address some of them. We take notes on them, so we put the ones together that we didn’t think we’d be able to pull together a full episode around. The topics we discuss this time are pretty varied, but we think you will enjoy them--mainly because you suggested them! It was so much fun recording this episode. So keep those comments and suggestions coming! What we talk about: The uncanny valley in movies, games, and other media General game design, including pet peeves, the best examples of single aspects, Bartle’s taxonomy, and the cost of games over the years. Digital copies vs physical copies of games Who’s our favorite Jedi? Products, games, and media that we just want to love, but don’t. Morality in roleplaying games. This turned into a very interesting discussion about gaming personalities and our real-life personalities. Thoughts ...

I'm going to be starting a new job soon and when life transitions happen something always has to give. So, there's probably going to be a writing slow down here on the blog.  I've been on the 5-7 post per week schedule for awhile and I'm going to let that go for the moment. I'll still be writing whenever I have the time and feel like it, but honestly... if there's anything I really want to discuss I'm going to make sure it makes it onto the podcast because that's something that won't have a slowdown.  Expect things you would normally see on here as short posts to now often end up on the Geek to Geek Podcast in the weekly geekery section instead. I'm still going to be posting the podcast on here every week and writing whenever I have the time and topic for it! Mostly, I'm not going anywhere, but the amount of writing I put out is probably going to take a hit for a while.  I just wanted to give a heads up!

The guys at Penny Arcade who do Acquisitions Incorporated released a Holiday Special! If you're not familiar with it, Acq Inc is a Dungeons and Dragons live play show.  It started out as a series of podcasts but quickly became a mainstay live play event at PAX that's captured on video and streamed to everyone.  This last year they finally dabbled in actually running a campaign between big set-piece events and released a season of a YouTube show. This picks up in that same vein.  It was really fun to watch.  It was definitely a side story so that you don't need it to know what's going on, but it was still interesting to watch through once.  This is the first time they've released something like this on a paid service so I hope it works out for them.  Luckily, a lot of people have Amazon Prime and it's included with that , which is how I watched it.  Otherwise it's only $5 on Amazon video or on Vimeo. Check it out if you're up to date with the ...

I checked out The Grand Budapest Hotel after seeing it on an episode of Movies of Mikey .  I knew almost nothing  about it going in except what I learned from that video. I liked it.  It's a little more... artsy... I think that's the word I want... than movies I typically watch but it was good anyway.  I really liked the framing devices they used for the different levels of story.  It has a story in a story in a story thing going on that's broken up by using different aspect ratios for different levels of the story.  There's also some unreliable narrator thrown in there too for good measure. I honestly didn't know if I would even make it five minutes into this movie but I was engrossed the whole time I was watching it.  With my typical kind of movies I would know who to recommend it to and who not too but this one throws me for a loop. I would say if you get a chance to try this one on the cheap you should give it a shot.  In the end, I ...

I replayed FFXV.  I waited until they patched in the New Game Plus mode so I could pick up with all my levels, skills, post game content, and items. This time through the game I only did the critical path, no side questing at all.  With my character levels this meant I got through the story really fast, which is exactly what I wanted.  Although, Chapter 13 still feels slow even with super high level characters and the patch they put in to make the magic faster. But, I think I appreciate the story more the second time.  I still like the surface level stuff going on and the relationships between the main party, but this second time I understood the story better between the main protagonist and antagonist.  And that story between Noctis and Ardyn is probably one of my favorite Final Fantasy stories ever.  I wish it were explained better the first time through instead of having a big info dump at the end.  It had a much bigger impact on me when I k...

Netflix Originals and Void’s Nintendo Switch Corner In this episode: Netflix Originals tend to keep our attention more than most other TV shows. For the most part, network TV doesn’t interest us, and we binge Netflix Originals and look forward to them all year long. The only other network putting out content as good as some of these Netflix Originals is HBO.  And even that is only a few shows like West World and Game of Thrones. Hulu and Amazon have original shows they produce, too, and they’re fantastic as well. But they’re few and far between compared to Netflix. Beej loves Casual on Hulu and Alpha House on Amazon. THere are others, too, that you should check out like 11-22-63 and The Man in the High Castle. Are the non-streaming networks are in trouble? We think so. Netflix is quadrupling their content this year, putting an additional $6 Billion for new content in 2017--including over 600 hours of new Netflix Originals. Just as an example, The Crown was picked up for ...