May 2024 Newsletter

[This was supposed to come out the first Wednesday of the month, but a goblin prevented that from happening.]

Another month has passed, and therefore, another Ranged Touch newsletter crosses your threshold. Let's get right down to it and figure out what the hell was going on for the past four weeks!

As you might expect, there were two rounds of MAGES & MURDERDADS, during which CMRN and Danni swung into the midgame of Baldur's Gate 3, clashing with some guy who turns out to be an undead elf or something and then having to deal with a selection of kooky Dark Souls freaks who are his children somehow. I don't think this game is very realistic? But hey, the show has a free podcast feed and that's nothing to sneeze at.

Meanwhile, this month GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES went deep on questions of Hamlet in the 1960s versus Hamlet in the 2010s, the stakes of professing one's romantic love on reality television, and all the various weird things that go into playing Alternate Reality Games with Lindsay Brandon Hunter's book PLAYING REAL, which is well worth your time and available on our Bookshop page. Next month we'll… we haven't precisely decided yet, but if you listen to the end of the ep you'll know we have something really surprising in store. Folks, are you ready for THE SUMMER OF GAMES?

Over on JUST KING THINGS, meanwhile, we "got real" by digging into Steve's second non-fiction book, ON WRITING, a combination memoir and how-to guide that is pretty good! It's great for weird anecdotes, although some of the pre-internet advice on how to network might be a bit outdated. What is NOT outdated are the thrills and chills provided by the accompanying Bonus Episode, on the 1960 British sf chiller VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. It's not a direct King adaptation, but boy does it have an outsize influence on the Kingian imaginary–as next month's episodes on Dreamcatcher, both the novel and its film adaptation, will demonstrate.

Elsewhere, we continued to soldier forth with Austin as SHELVED BY GENRE explores Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, with this month's episodes finishing up the second half of TALES FROM EARTHSEA, a bonus episode on the extremely questionable Studio Ghibli film TALES FROM EARTHSEA (not actually an adaptation of the book TALES FROM EARTHSEA tho), plus a mainline ep on the final Earthsea novel, THE OTHER WIND, a rollicking tale of a bunch of depressed people having conversations about why they need to destroy a false and dehumanizing afterlife. Next month we'll conclude the Earthsea unit with some miscellaneous short stories, a big old Q&A, and an episode on the classic Hallmark film THE GOOD WITCH. After that, we'll transition into our next unit, covering some selected works of the Japanese horror manga maestro Junji Ito! A schedule will go up shortly, but for now, you can find the tomes we'll be covering are listed on our Bookshop page.

Wow! What a month it was, chock full of "content" like never before. Or exactly as before, considering this is all pretty scheduled? Anyway, we couldn't do it without the aid of our producer Jordan Mallory, or with the support of ALL OF YOU FOLKS ON PATREON! (cheering, hollering from the crowd for you) Thanks so much for listening to Ranged Touch, and as we head into the summer months, "keep yourself frosty."