T w e n t y S i d e d

Meta, or self-aware horror, is typically said to have begun with 1996’s Scream. But as any pedant will gleefully point out Wes Craven’s New Nightmare incorporates the fundamental conventions of meta-horror in 1994. Wait! Kevin Williamson wrote the first concept of Scream in 1994! Yeah. Probably about the same time Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was being made. Except the concept for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was at least eight years old. The basic plot was pitched by Wes Craven originally when he signed on to write the third Nightmare movie; a project that would become 1987’s The Dream Warriors. It became The Dream Warriors because New Line Cinema didn’t like Craven’s story, mainly the entire “meta” idea. But none of that matters anyway, because There’s Nothing Out There was made in 1990 for less than the cost of most houses in the United States.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Horror Slasher Evolution: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?”

Horror is an expansive genre of media that has many branches underneath it. When the average person pictures horror, they typically think of a slasher or ghost story thriller. It’s typically a fun watch where bad people get what’s coming to them or the protags come out victorious with a newfound appreciation of their lives or family. On the opposite end of that spectrum is where I lay in wait. Mouth, eyes, and ears agape waiting to consume all. Misery porn.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Idiot’s Analysis Of A Film: The Night House”

Ethan Rodgers

This week we finally beat Baldurs Gate 3.

Even though we beat the game in honor mode, we didn’t get the achievement for it due to having mods. It makes sense for that achievement to be disabled with mods, but it’s a little sad that we didn’t get it. Most of our mods were cosmetics and quality of life, so nothing too crazy. The last few fights we did weren’t too bad considering it was the end of the game, it probably helped that our huge collection of scrolls and potions finally got some use after hoarding things the entire game. I don’t have anything to say about the end because anything I say would be spoilers for the end of the game, that said, good game. probably will play another run in a bit.

Other than that, not much going on. Just waiting for Slay the Spire 2 to go into early access. Probably will play some Terraria soon since it updated recently. Was waiting to finish Baldurs Gate first.

How’s everyone else doing this week?

Issac Young Youngest child of Shamus Young. He/Him

I woke up thinking about the “rock” band The Eagles of Death Metal (“rock” is quoted because they are a multi-genre group). I don’t dislike them, to be clear; but I’m not a particular fan. In fact I had never heard of them before they appeared on Kesha’s album Rainbow in 2017. The band name is conspicuous and the typical explanation is that the founders, inspired by some incident, wondered what a cross of The Eagles with Death Metal would sound like. But as can be seen in the details of the varied stories, there is a more dismissive point of view behind the idea: The Eagles of Death Metal play about as much Death Metal as The Eagles play rock music. AND TO BE CRYSTAL CLEAR: I don’t mean this as an insult to either group. If you like The Eagles or The Eagles of Death Metal, THAT’S GREAT. Listen to who you want to listen to. Have your own opinions about it. IN MY OWN OPINION, The Eagles occasionally “flirt” with playing a rock song. Some of their early work is very borderline. But their big hits, the things they’re known for, are easy listening. Pop music of the era of their popularity. Important songs, some arguably deep songs…certainly *influential* songs. But still, The Eagles aren’t the platonic ideal of rock music, they are possibly the preeminent example of baseline watered down rock music of the times. I think The Eagles of Death Metal used the song as a humorous reference, not as a position statement. If a band is The Eagles of Death Metal (as a metaphor) are they even *playing* Death Metal? Is their product even *metal music*?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Horror Slasher Evolution: The Eagles of Slasher Movies”

Paige Francis He/him

Back in my day the whole game shipped on the disc or cart and it worked!

I remember the first “DLC” I ever cared about. Halo 2’s expansion maps. I spent entire nights playing Halo 2 with my friend, his brother, and occasionally a third person. That’s right. I had 2 and sometimes 3 friends. One of us went to the local used games store and picked up the add-on installation disc and installed them. It was a novel concept for us: adding new things to a game that had already come out.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Brief Thoughts On The Complicated Topic of DLC”

Ethan Rodgers

This week I’ve been surprisingly busy, so not much Baldur’s Gate 3.

Out of the Baldur’s Gate we did play, the only real thing of note was going through the House of Hope, which went ok, I guess. There were no party wipes, but we did reload a few times because we wanted to keep an NPC alive. If we weren’t trying to keep them alive, I don’t think we would’ve needed to reload. That said, there was only one iffy encounter, and that was the two Spectators with the group of Imps, the Spectators weren’t that bad, the main reason it went poorly was the Imps kept pushing everyone into a chasm.

That’s about all that happened this week. So how’s everyone else doing?

Issac Young Youngest child of Shamus Young. He/Him

Most of this last week has been spent getting games and some accessories working on the new computer. OpenRGB is able to control the Asus TF120 fans and the Peerless Assassin 120 fans, as well as the Redragon gaming mouse. I’ve still got a weird incompatibility between Polychromatic and my Linux headers that keeps me from accessing the two Razer devices. But as I can’t do anything with the keyboard and gamepad but turn the lighting on or off, and I can do that manually; it’s not really an issue. I also installed a program to adjust the digital display on the Peerless Assassin. It won’t auto-load on reboot; apparently because of an incorrect pointer in a script that *can* be corrected…but you can also just restart the service after a reboot and accomplish the same thing. I moved the connection on the mechanical hard drive, which proved what I figured out was correct: the 5th and 6th SATA connections on the motherboard were disabled because I have two NVMe’s installed. I used the #4 connection and everything worked. Once that was corrected I used KDE Partition Manager to edit the mount points of all my drives so I didn’t have to manually re-mount everything after every reboot. That worked fine on the laptop the last several months, but with an additional two drives to mount and a willingness to connect programs to various external drives, auto-mounting is extremely useful.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “How Do You Minecraft?”

Paige Francis He/him