Ranged Touch posts
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We Talked About The Last Jedi
The holidays have really messed up our schedule, but we took out some time to talk about The Last Jedi. Do you want to know what we thought of it? Listen to what we thought about it!We're making this show freely available! If you like it, consider backing us at $5 a month to listen to our podcast!Thanks for listening!
January 2018 Podcast
Hello! Thank you for supporting this podcast and us. We got together to talk about the things that we liked in 2017. It's a fun time! We talk about a lot of stuff, and there's no list because it's a SURPRISE!
December 2017 Podcast
I FORGOT TO WRITE DOWN THE DISCUSSION TOPICS THIS TIME.WE SPEND A LONG TIME TALKING ABOUT DESTINY 2.
December 2017 Newsletter
This is our new newsletter. Are you excited to read it?Sorry for the long delay! The holidays delayed us a little, but I promise that it’s worth it.CMRN’s PartI’ve recently gotten into the world of Playstation 2 emulation, and I’m excited to attempt some Streamed Content over the next few weeks based on that emulation. I played quite a bit of Minority Report: Everybody Runs, one of the best games ever made, and I also went back to the team-controlling stealth shooter SOCOM to see if it was as good as I remembered. It’s still pretty go...
November 2017 Newsletter
Hello!CMRN here. I have had one of the busiest months in my entire life! So I don't have much Excellent Newsletter Content for you. Luckily, Danni has a great review for you below. I will give you all the really good words next time. Please accept episodes 36 and 37 of Mages and Murderdads as a consolation prize. Our XCOM playthrough is also still going! We have some really great one-off content as soon as I have a free moment to edit the video together!Danni's CornerFury Of Dracula:Fury of Dracula is an asymmetrical competitive map con...
November 2017 Podcast
We talk about: DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN NEW TRAILERNECROPOLISSHADOW OF WAR (POLYGON PIECE, WAYPOINT PIECE)TRACKLESSGAMEPLAY MODEDARK SOULS 2DESTINY 2STRANGER THINGS S2ALZABO SOUP PODCASTFINAL FANTASY 9
October 2017 Podcast
I forgot to write down all the things we talk about! Here are some I remember:PUMPKINHEADITCURB YOUR ENTHUSIASMDRIZZT DOURDENFIRST LAW TRILOGYTHE STEEL REMAINSSHADOWRUN RETURNSDAVE ARNESONOTHER THINGS I CANNOT REMEMBER
October 2017 Newsletter
Hello! Here is this month’s newsletter!10 Quick Names for NPCs in your Tabletop Game1. Pem Glenwing2. Score “Hammer” Mantle3. Parity-With-Scorn Herring4. Sam Sandwich5. Ellenwyn Thimble6. Calypso Hogwash7. Anama Le8. Corn9. Hail Olwyn10. Skerring PolfishNotes From CMRN During The Month of SeptemberI’ve spent a lot of time watching Toast of London, a show that’s created and starring Matt Berry. You might know him from Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, and he’s playing a similar character here; a rich, proper English man who is kind of a...
September 2017 Podcast
Wow! This is the first Ranged Touch podcast. A sampling of stuff that we talk about is below:To the Finland StationThe Dark Elf TrilogyLucifer comics + Sandman comicsThe UnwrittenThe Girl With All The GiftsAll The Light They Cannot SeeFirst Law TrilogyFrasierCheersThe Walking DeadArrested DevelopmentDark SoulsJust Cause 3EternalTacomaXCOMConan ExilesDestiny 2Grand Theft Auto 5Tacoma
September 2017 Newsletter
Hello! Here is this month’s newsletter.Four NPCs for Any Inn1. Pepper the Golden ElfYou see an elf of medium height who appears to be gilded in the shiniest gold. His name is Pepper, and he’s been living in this inn for the past two years. He makes a decent living allowing people to gawk at him or touch him, but there is a sadness in his golden eyes that is unmistakable. The inn’s bodyguards perk up when people get near pepper; more than one person has come to the inn with the hope of taking a finger or an ear from Pepper.It is unclear if...
May 2017
Hello all!I hope that you are doing well. I've just posted the May essays, one on the video game Pool Nation and the other on a collection of science fiction biographies, and I think those will be my last essays for a while.I've struggled with this Patreon going up and down for the last little while, and after some conversations with Danni (the cohost of Mages & Murderdads), I have come to the decision that I will be focusing the content here toward what we have done with M&MD and some other stuff that we have in the works.Don't wor...
On Hell's Cartographers
I stumbled onHell's Cartographers in the strangest way. I was looking for some book about speculation, and I discovered that the library catalog system has something akin to a science fiction criticism designation. It was all essay collections from authors (Samuel Delaney was well represented), and amidst all of the predictable pieces I saw a grey spine with a title glued to it. I don't know what happened to this book since its publication in 1975, but some real shit went down since that time, and the book took a beating.I grabbed it, o...
On Pool Nation
I've never been a "pool person." I've played it a few times, for sure, and recently I probably played a dozen games of it over the course of a three day period. Pool has the same mystery for me that bowling does. Like the ability to make a quarter disappear, a person's ability to excel at these games seems to hide inside of them.If you see a professional runner, or a tennis player, or a football player, you can tell. Those sports run rough shod over the human body, and they change their players on a physical level for everyo...
April 2017
Whoa! Last month was probably one of the most busy of the last few years of my life! I got married! I traveled to various places! I didn't get as much work done as I would like!That also means that I didn't get the two essays finished for this month! I did get one finished on how Battlefield 1 tells its story, and I made that available a minute ago for $5 subscribers. For everyone else, you just get something extra next month. Big apologies about that! Good stuff to come.If you're a subscriber for that sweet Mages and Murderdads con...
On Battlefield 1's Storytelling Method
I've slowly (very slowly) been working my way through Battlefield 1's campaign over the past couple weeks after having exclusively playing its multiplayer mode in the past, and I have to say that I'm both puzzled by how the game tells its story and how reviewers of the game viewed that storytelling method.Battlefield 1 goes for the anthology format across the various theaters of a vaguely-historical World War 1. You spend a little time as an Italian, some more as a woman fighting against the Ottoman Empire, and so on in a grand tour...
March 2017
Wow! Thanks for bearing with me over the past couple days -- I've been profoundly busy, and it took me an extra couple days to polish off the essays for this month.The $3 essay is on a mission in Modern Warfare Remastered that I think does really interesting and cool work. The $5 essay is a short reading of the Philip K. Dick novel Eye In The Sky, which is the most wonderful criticism of ideology I think I've ever read. I hope you enjoy both of them!On the video front, Mages & Murderdads is still going strong. March saw us release the f...
On Eye in the Sky (1957)
Eye in the Sky is a Philip K. Dick novel about worlds. Like much of Dick's fiction, the novel is concerned about how we come to know the conditions of the world around us. Eye cleaves close to a formula that Dick liked to use very often: a group of people are brought into proximity with one another, and forces beyond their control put them into psychic connection with one another. Like in Ubik or A Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky is about how the humans, often in concert with one another, mold the world into particular shapes.The conceit of t...
On Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's "One Shot, One Kill"
I've recently been making my way (slowly) through the "remaster" of Modern Warfare. It's a weird romp of a time, and one gets the feeling while playing through it that there were two ideas of what this game should be.One was an idea that this would be a way to bring a legendary game into the hands of newly-twenty-somethings who had never played it before. If you remember playing that game when it came out originally: congratulations, you are old. An entire generation of video game players has risen up while you've been decay...
February 2017
Whoa hell I have been profoundly busy, but things are trucking here on the Patreon. Last month's posts went up today (I foolishly messed up my calendar).The $3 post is about Crusader Kings II and what kind of person it wants you to be.The $5 post is about the novel The Shining.Mages & Murderdads keeps on trucking in a great way, and we did an excellent (if I may say so) interview with Phil Daigle from Beamdog about the development of Siege of Dragonspear that you might like. Tomorrow we will start Baldur's Gate II, and we are very excit...
The Shining and the Annihilated Face
I recently re-readThe Shiningafter readingDoctor Sleep, and I was struck by two things: it really might be one of the best American novels of the 20th century; it hinges on a moment of annihilation.The film ofThe Shiningfollows Jack Torrance's slow dissolution by the Overlook Hotel (and then what he does to his family after he is fully dissolved), and that film really stresses that everything that occurs in the film is latent in Torrance. It is about a man giving himself over to something monstrous and becoming a semi-willing tool of that m...
Crusader Kings 2 and the Gritty Past
I've taken a deep dive into Crusader Kings 2 for an article that I'm working on, and I've been way into trying to unite the Kingdom of Wales into a powerhouse of violence and prosperity during the earliest parts of the Middle Ages. It's really hard, and I've failed every single time over my six or seven playthroughs, but I feel like I'm getting closer.What's struck me about these games is that how they play with history. The characters that exist in the time period where the player begins their game exist their; some...
The Technics of the Contemporary Funeral
Roger Caillois is mostly known in game studies as the guy who created the typology of games. Within his four types, each resting on a scale of pure play to pure rules, he created a matrix of understanding how people played. Along the way, he tried to figure out what play really is, and that typology is interesting in that it brings in the play of being another person: mimesis, reproduction, and for Caillois it meant taking on a role.But what game studies, and the general discussion of Caillois in relation to games, doesn't often talk about ...
Bad Affect as Game Design, Or It Feels Good For Overwatch To Feel Bad
There's a lot of talk in game design about how to make people feel things.For the Skinner Box people, the ones who are trying to psychologically dial in exactly how good it should feel to win a match of a competitive card game you play on your phone, you do it through stimulus. You click the button, and it lights up just right. When you open your box of loot that you got from winning way too many games, it shakes in just the right way. But if you hold off on that shake-y click, you might be able to upgrade that bronze box into a silver box ...
September 2016
Hello!I've been so incredibly busy this past month! Danni and I have been making more Mages and Murderdads episodes, and I've continued to post our Let's Play of Beyond: Two Souls!As far as written content is concerned, it's been a bit of a dry patch due to Extreme Busy Times, but halfway through October my schedule will allow me to get back to some of that very good #content that you all know and love.There hasn't been a Player//Knowledge video in a little while, and I apologize for that! More are coming in the future once ...
August 2016
Hello!I hope that all of you are doing well. Sorry for the delay on this post -- I am in the middle of reading for the comprehensive exams of my PhD, and I have been jam-packed with things to do for the past couple months.Sorry that there isn't a PLAYER//KNOWLEDGE video this month! I'm a little short of the funding mark that makes it mandatory, and I have had SO MANY OTHER THINGS going on that it's been hard to keep up! But never fear! If you like P//K, it is coming back soon.In other news, many videos have gone up over at my YouTub...
July 2016 patron supported
Thank you so much for the support this month!
July 2016
Wow! Hello!It's been a weird early summer for me, and there wasn't an update last month! Oh no! But in reality that is a-okay. You can watch this video I made about the design of Overwatch, or you can watch my new John Warcraft series, or you can listen to my new podcast about the Baldur's Gate series, or you can read some of the excellent new stuff over at This Cage is Worms.Important news beyond the normal creation of things for your enjoyment. I'm actually working on a new game? And that game might be very excellent?It's ...
June 2016 patron supported
Thank you so much for the support this month!
May 2016 patron supported
Thank you so much for the support this month!
May 2016
Hello everyone!Player/Knowledge is a little late this month due to some unforeseen problems, but we're back with a shorter video that goes into some small pieces of Hitman Absolution that I think are worth...thinking...about.My current Cities Skylines let's play is going to be finishing up next week, and a Civilization V let's play will start. It will be the same Chill Content that you have always known and loved!Thanks so much for your support! Hope you have a great May!CK
