things i've been watching/listening to, im tired edition
Posted 3/4/2025
i've been fucking busy with day job. we had a pet health scare (she's fine now). i am having trouble sleeping again. i just need to focus on the things that have been keeping me going through this all.
i'm a creature of habit, rewatching and relistening to stuff i like, so you could check out any of my previous things ive been watching/listening to also and probably have the same effect, but here are some notable new things ive been enjoying as of late.
The Mystery of the Druids: A Bizarre Adventure Game
so sometimes i just pick a video to have on to fall asleep to, a video that i've watched a lot or enjoy, not too high energy, whatever. i've back to using the ol classic by mandalore gaming, his review of The Mystery of the Druids. mandalore's voice is pretty deep and speaks with a pretty even tone so he fits right into the category of youtubers i like to watch because they just can calmly talk about anything, even one of the weirdest games ever concocted.
halfway through the video, he does play the full cutscene of someone like fullbody screaming. it maybe wakes me up about half of the time but thats ok. im not gonna fault the video for that.
anyway, go watch this video if you haven't. its a really good look into this strange era of adventure games.
JOKZI OZO by Oliver Buckland
i'm a big fan of corru.observer, i'm a big fan of oliver buckland, this is a really good song. i've listened to it every once in a while and wondered why in the world i hadn't purchased it yet. its wonderfully haunting and beautiful at the same time.
on buckland's youtube upload of the song, he has a little bit more of an insight into the background behind the song and its really interesting to see even the small parts of the process that went into how it was made.
Why Slay The Spire’s UI Ruined The Game and How a Server Fixed it
i'm making a board game. well, i'd say its a ttrpg and board game hybrid. i don't use that term (hybrid) lightly, but i think some people would surely have something to say about its usage. im not listening to those people and im having fun making my stupid game. i'll maybe talk about it some other time.
anyway, making anything that would occupy a space that already exists means examining what other people have done or are doing. slay the spire had the benefit and also the trouble of being one of the first hit deckbuilding roguelike games in the modern era. they also made a board game based on the video game. i've played the board game. it fucking owns so fucking hard and i can't wait to be able to play it again. i have been playing a lot of digital slay the spire in anticipation of slay the spire 2. i love slay the spire… and im doing it for research! i'm playing and learning, i promise!!
this video by ThatGuyGlen is a really concise 21 minute look into the history of the development of slay the spire and the lengths that the developers went from a design and visual perspective to make their game stand out. i hadn't really looked into the living devlopment of slay the spire so this is a really good look into it. i highly recommend you give it watch yourself if you're at all curious on how this game was made.
Bad Apple but it's the OldSchool RuneScape soundfont
idk man a bad apple cover is just classic.
Dungeons & Dragons (2000 film)
a friend mentioned the new dnd movie, so i wanted to revisit the old one. its frankly insane that this movie came out in the 2000s and looks like that. i mean both positively and negatively.
a friend commented on me posting screenshots that it looks really dated, but it felt a lot more convincingly fantasy than modern things, and really? it does. this movie is absolutely campy as fuck, the costumes are insane, jeremy irons is putting his whole pussy into it, Bruce Payne as Damodar wearing that cool blue #5 lipstick, there is a fucking Vibe that this movie has that no movie i've ever seen since has ever replicated.
anyway, did you know that they made two sequels?
Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God
set 100 years after the first movie, Damodar is the only character that comes back and the whole reason everything is happening is because Jeremy Iron's character from the first movie put a curse on him to be revived as an undead thing and he finds a stupid little orb that revives his humanity and maybe also awakens a black dragon.
this movie follows Berek, a lord who was the former captain of the king's guard who's salty about not being a captain anymore. anyway in order to save his wife from being death cursed and stop the black dragon from awakening. he makes a party of weirdos to help him find the macguffin or whatever.
this movie does not have the sauce. its fucking boring honestly. the special effects suck, but also the practical effects do too. there was a weird charm to the first movie's bad cg, this is mid 2000 syfy channel cg that even the actors look unconvinced of. in the first movie they found a dwarf in the trash and he just came along for the ride. aquiring an adventuring party in all of the same scene just because you hired them is fine for a dnd campaign but in a dnd campaign you get to have some character interaction. the barbarian is mad. the rogue is shifty. the sorcerer is hot. the cleric has some green lines on his head i couldn't figure out if he was a cleric or a druid for a little bit. there's even apparently a lich that shows up and the character has the worst rubber mask in a film i have ever seen in my fucking life. you made dnd liches suck. how dare you.
but they made a third movie
i didn't watch that one. maybe i will one day.