January 2024 Newsletter

What better way to ring in the new year than another issue of the Ranged Touch Monthly Newsletter? I certainly can't think of anything, because if I could, I'd probably be doing that instead of this!

2023 was a big year for us, as our audience grew, and we concluded old shows while also beginning some new ones. Early on, Michael and CMRN completed HOMESTUCK MADE THIS WORLD, covering the end of the comic, the epilogues, and pulling off various mind-bending reversals and plot twists in the process. Then they launched straight into an Undertale LP, because why not? And just a few months after bidding farewell to Jom, Karkant, Vrisko, Sams Skeleton, and all the rest, they also said goodbye (for now) to the post-apocalypse, sewing up TOO MUCH FUTURE with a playthrough of Fallout 4 and a brief journey through the weirdness of 76.

In important general Ranged Touch developments, thanks to your continued generous support we were able to bring on Jordan Mallory as a producer to help out with the Homestuck Made This World Bonus Episodes. Jordo then rose even higher in our esteem by helping us launch with pal Austin Walker an entirely new series, SHELVED BY GENRE, which just ended its first season–more on that below, as I let you know not about the year that was, but the specific month just passed.

December began with CMRN and Danni previewing and prepping the next season of Mages & Murderdads in the monthly podcast, and later on CMRN got a little retrospective doing a Top 10 Year End list for Remap. On the very final day of the year we also dropped a new GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES, where Michael and CMRN looked at Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software by Mizuko Ito, giving them opportunities to talk about how before kids were always on that damn phone, they were always on that damn computer, and ignoring the educational benchmarks of their software in order to click on all the stuff that made fart noises. Next month you'll be able to follow along with Amanda Cote's Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games, which you can pick up via our Bookshop page.

December also found JUST KING THINGS once again exploring the haunted backwoods of Maine with 1998's Bag of Bones, King's literary gothic that takes some big swings on issues of married life, love, desire, race, and American history. Not all of them are hits, but if all we wanted was the hits, we wouldn't be doing the show. Speaking of, next month we'll be tackling the 1999 "novel for television" Storm of the Century, a screenplay King published simultaneously with its TV miniseries production, which we'll be watching for January's Bonus Episode. That marks a return to normal for our bonus eps, as December's was centered on the Winter Feast CMRN and Michael composed from the recipes on offer in Teresa Carle-Sanders's Castle Rock Kitchen cookbook–check that out if you want to know the good details about basic alfredo sauce and how to make sure your maple walnut ice cream comes out stellar.

Meanwhile, big events transpired over on SHELVED BY GENRE, as we finally finished up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun by concluding our discussion of its fourth volume Citadel of the Autarch and then put ourselves through (good, cosmically necessary) torture by reading the belated and controversially silly coda volume, Urth of the New Sun. Along with that, we did a long Q&A bonus episode to conclude the run, and in the near future you can look forward to our holiday "breather" episode as we discuss Hallmark's festive time travel romcom, Next Stop, Christmas. After that, the mainline show will pivot to our next project, Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea, which we'll be reading out of the omnibus edition illustrated by Charles Vess and which you can find listed on our Bookshop page.

Thank you so much for listening to and supporting Ranged Touch, so we can continue these and other projects! We're exciting to see what the New Year will bring for us, and for you!

And if you're looking for stylish ways to ring in 2024, remember: we have a t-shirt store.