Hey everyone! It’s Red Lanyard back for another weekly jam session where we talk about what things have been keeping us sane during quarantine! I hope everyone followed up on the homework I posted to the FB page about some media that honors the late Chadwick Boseman and his incredible contributions to film.
What I’ve been playing:
I’ve been pecking away at a few different games lately, actually. I finished AC Origins and must commend it for the positive changes it made in gameplay and storytelling for the franchise. I’ve also been playing a wonderful little roguelike game called HADES on Steam. Always remember to support your indie game developers! Other than that, I got to playtest some Unearthed Arcana for D&D; I played a gnome armorer artificer/echo knight in my friend’s one-shot campaign he ran for us. I modeled my character off Hammond from Overwatch, and I gotta say it was a blast! The upcoming D&D supplement book Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything will make the artificer an official class in November, so it was great to playtest it a little bit before becoming an official release! It’ll definitely be a book I pick up this year.
What I’ve been watching:
The big update I have on this front is that The New Mutants is officially out in theaters and marks the end–finally–of the Fox X-Men cinematic universe. My fiance and I went to see it–with masks and socially-distanced, of course!–and well, it was definitely a movie. I can’t say I was overall happy with their depiction of Magik as a racist, and the story was simultaneously all over the place as well as very stagnant, but as a Native American, I appreciated the representation in the movie regardless of how underwhelming the movie itself is. This installment will likely end up in the same echelon as most of the recent X-Men films: mediocre to the point of being forgotten, much like Dark Phoenix and Apocalypse. Ah well, at least we should be getting some X-Men in the MCU in. . .um. . .maybe a few years?
What I’ve been reading:
In addition to the Star Wars Thrawn books, I’ve also been trying out some new comics while revisiting some old ones. I’ve been going back through the Ultimate Spider-Man run as well as starting in on some DC Rebirth trades (yes, I’m a terrible comicbook fan when it comes to keeping up with the times). I’ve read the first volumes of Wonder Woman and Aquaman, which haven’t been bad, but just haven’t quite grabbed me. We’ll see how far I get in my endeavor to catch up on current comics as the year goes on! Remember to support your local comicbook shop!
