Andrew Yoder

Finally saw John Carpenter's The Fog! It's fun, though a bit clunky. I wasn't expecting the slow build of strange happenings around town, but those turned out to be my favorite bits!

Ju-On: The Grudge is pretty silly in its execution. Mainly a series of scares like Hausu. But I love the mechanic of the curse spreading into apocalyptic proportions. With better technique, this could be really scary.

That bit in "Nyarlathotep" where the crowd wanders off into the overgrown subway, with the echoing of their mad laughter being the last the narrator hears--big mood.

Thinking on what I want out of horror, and it's to cackle and howl at cosmic absurdities under the cracking illusions of social constructs, and then walk out of the theater to tell friends "what fun!"

Paranormal Activity is spooky! I had only seen the sequel, and I might like it better (some cooler tricks with the scares), but maybe that's because I saw it first. Either way, it's a really affecting mode of horror for me 👻😱

The venn diagram of horror and comedy is *almost* a circle. The scenes in Barbarian with the police are equally horrifying and hilarious.

Barbarian is one hell of a horror movie! Lot of fun twists and false turns. Even more excited to see Weapons now.

Gonna see the tank craft woman about my future, and also repairs to the timing belt and cracked radiator.

Saw a translation of "psychic" as "tankekraft"(?) which, misheard as "tank craft", is hilarious.

Next up (tomorrow night), I'm thinking Barbarian, or Paranormal Activity, or Midsommar.

Weather has taken an autumnal turn, so I've queued up a whole list of horror movies.

Started with Ringu. Fun and spooky, though I struggled with the language (swedish subs). I like the emphasis on research and investigation.

Session 2 of "Dream Eater" for Call of Cthulhu: the american punched a monk on a train to Tokyo while the para-psychologist had a nice cup of tea with an old man. Running a sandbox scenario has been a fun challenge.

A TTRPG as a trap to turn players into GMs 😂

A meta-horror TTRPG where your player characters are investigating a cursed TTRPG. You could end up roleplaying characters who are roleplaying characters who are investigating a cursed TTRPG

If/when you guys do illustrations for locations, I'd love to see how you'd represent the black castle from Shadows Linger!

Loving the character illustrations, though!

ah yeah the familiar whiplash of seeing a legacy media org cover something you're an actual expert in and realizing "oh if this is how badly they're fucking up this, how badly are they fucking up every other topic?"

The context I'm in, often when LD is in suport it's because it's some other team's turn to solo (often narrative, sometimes anim events and setpieces, but sometimes it's the combined art departments creating mood). But sometimes it's purely functional for tech reasons too.

(That makes it sound like a *new* learning, but it's more like subtle reinforcement and refinement of earlier learnings in new contexts.)

Oh boy so much for a throwaway joke

Joke aside, the last few years have held a ton of learnings for me. Most are subtle. One is knowing when the level design needs to guitar solo (not often) and when it needs to be backing rhythm and bass (most of the time), and how to do both those roles.

Level design is pretty easy, once you have 10 or 15 years of practice.

TTRPGs is maybe a weird choice for hobbies though. GMing takes sooo much time to prep, and then your players might ask you to improvise all kinds of stuff anyway, and it's all used up once the session is done 🫠

This was the first session running "The Dream Eater" from Sutra of The Pale Leaves for Call of Cthulhu. It looks like it will be another 2 or 3 sessions to wrap it up.

Also I really like that it's a metaphysical threat. Setting things on fire doesn't work as a solution here!

Dream sequences in TTRPGs are dope. While prepping this scenario, I was on the fence, but I just had the best "yes, and..." bit of roleplaying and DMing.

It's like if you took the "bump the lampshade" moment of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but every scene.

Saw the Akira 4K rerelease in theatres, and it's wild how well-crafted everything is. Every scene does some new trick or technique, or tackles some subject matter that looks so technically impressive.

Going into next session, my character has an inexplicable urge to defend the haunted house. This probably doesn't end well for him.

Delta Green continues to be pretty great.

At the session's end, my character was prone in a crawlspace under the definitely-haunted house with a rope tied around my waist. My flashlight went out, plunging me into total darkness, and something grabbed me. I gave the rope two quick pulls to signal the agents, but the rope came up slack 👻

In today's Delta Green session, I played a paranormal blogger who was pulled into an investigation of a haunted house. My character isn't fully briefed on the Delta Green mission, and thinks he's there to get proof of ghosts for his blog; he's actually there to be an expendable.

Sorry but personally if a miniature horse woke me up from anesthesia by banging out nonsense on a miniature keyboard it would send me into a liminal space between life and death from which I would never return