Web Crush Wednesdays: Dungeons, Dice, & Everything Nice

My obsession with Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t seem to be going away. Playing it is so much fun, and there’s so many great D&D stories told in various podcasts and webshows, that I just can’t stop watching and listening and looking for more. I especially try to look for shows featuring female DMs and female players since most popular D&D productions, such as The Adventure Zone and even Critical Role, are male-dominated. And so today, I want to tell you about about a cool and funny all-women D&D actual play podcast: Dungeons, Dice, & Everything Nice.

Some spoilers below.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural

Fandom secret: I actually really like a lot of Buzzfeed’s content.

I know it’s the cool thing these days to shit on everything that happens to carry the name “Buzzfeed” on it, and yeah, some of their videos and articles take a full dive into “what the actual fuck”, but if you think there’s not a single interesting thing on there, then I have to believe you’re full of shit. For me, the prime time for watching Buzzfeed videos is the same sort of time period where one may be drawn into watching things from the creepier and weirder side of YouTube–some nebulous time at night where there may be something better to do, but who knows what that is. Thankfully Buzzfeed has a series that covers both of those categories; one that I hope continues to flourish.

Web Crush Wednesdays: The Cryptid Keeper

I’ve made no secret here that I love things of a cryptid-friendly nature, so when I stumbled across The Cryptid Keeper podcast — through no one’s recommendation except the iTunes search function — I was intrigued. I immediately downloaded an episode to check out, but worried before I had a chance to listen that the hosts would end up being Dean Winchester types to whom I was never the intended audience. Much to my surprise and joy, I soon discovered that the hosts were two millennial women #justlikeme. But really, just like me, down to their love of Lin-Manuel Miranda and tendency to quote Spongebob. Within an episode, I was hooked.

The Ouija Experiment: Haunted By Bad Writing and Racism

via Giphy

Yes, readers, this is what I have been reduced to. September will soon become October, and it’s still hot as balls outside. I am unwilling to give up on the idea of the possibility of a more temperate autumn, though! So this week I went all the way–from cute magical anime to B-grade horror flicks.

After watching the 2014 Ouija movie, I basically lost all hope of there being a good horror movie concerning Ouija boards ever. (Not that I was expecting that movie to be great, it was just so, so much worse than I could have ever anticipated.) And on starting the 2013 indie film The Ouija Experiment, I didn’t expect anything amazing either. In fact, I almost didn’t watch it until I realized that, shockingly, most of the main cast wasn’t white. While the diversity was enough to initially draw me in, and the movie’s determination to not immediately fall into the typical tropes of Ouija bullshit kept pulling me along, in the end The Ouija Experiment’s casting did very little to save it. In fact, the diverse casting seemed to only exist so the writer, Tony Snearly, had an excuse to whip out a bunch of racist jokes. 

Spoilers below the cut.

Web Crush Wednesdays: The Arcana

The last thing I need right now is another game. I know this, but I also know full well that I’ll always, always make time for dating sims. I was pulled into this one by a couple of people from one of my D&D groups and was pleasantly surprised to discover that while I’m certainly easily swayed into trying dating sims by people simply saying that they’re good, this game is good. Very good. Follow me below the cut for a tale of murder, magic, intrigue, and most importantly, the Arcana.

Fanfiction Fridays: Barovian Souvenirs by Tracks

Me during the final episode. (via Giphy)

At long last I finished the first season of Dice, Camera, Action!, a D&D webshow much in the vein of others such as The Adventure Zone and Critical Role. The events leading up to the final showdown with the vampire lord Strahd was as about as intense and chaotic as one could expect, yet as the dust settled I found myself wanting more. Yes, there’s another season out—which I started—but something about the way things finished left me seeking out some comfort fic both for the characters and to ease my shaken heart. Luckily, even amidst the seemingly small bounty, fanfic provides.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Peritale

I’ll be honest: I’ve been away from the webcomic scene for a while. I’ll see an update of one of the series I used to read often floating around online and hum to myself, “Oh, so that’s what those wacky kids have been up to.” It’s nice, but also leaves me somewhat  nostalgic for the time where I had several series I kept up with. While today’s web crush may not get me back on the webcomic routine (by no one’s fault but that of my own inattentiveness), it did achieve the one thing that many other series in the past years have tried and failed at: it drew me in enough to actually read through the archive.

Also, it’s cute as hell, so how could it not?

Tales of the Rays Needs to Shine Some Light on Its Other Protagonist

In the balmy days of our summer vacation I figured it would be as good a time as any to clear out my mobage (mobile game) catalog on my emulator. Yet, as is the result of most of my cleaning ventures, I made space only to fill it up once again. Whoops!

Among my newest set of free to play mobile adventures is Tales of the Rays, a Namco Bandai exploration into how to adapt a console Tales game into a more portable format. Though I started only recently, Rays’s troubling trends only seem to get worse and worse the further I get. Not in terms of the gameplay (which is pretty fun, honestly), but in the development of the two protagonists, especially in concerns to the lady on the squad, Mileena.

via Bleeding Cool

Trailer Tuesdays: The Shape of Water

Comic-Con isn’t really my scene, but this year a trailer dropped and with it, so too did my pre-emptive ten bucks for a theater ticket. Amidst the other announcements, none more enchanted me than beloved director Guillermo del Toro’s fusion between fairy tale and horror story, The Shape of Water. Just…. just look at it.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Binging With Babish

Through whatever machinations of fate and luck, sometimes I manage to hop onto a big thing before it becomes big. While sometimes that thing is a little more niche (like a mysterious little dating sim for mobile devices), making it that much more surprising when it does become huge, this time it felt inevitable that this YouTube channel would rise up in the ratings and take the internet cooking world by storm. If you’ve checked out the front page of YouTube at any point in the last year and glanced at the trending videos, then I’m sure you’ve seen a link to the show Binging With Babish. If you’ve avoided them because trending videos are typically trash and not indicative of what’s actually good on YouTube, then I’m here to tell you that you need to watch at least one episode immediately. I’ll even let you pick.