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This is Audio EXP for the 3rd of February, and the episode title is “Ghosts and crime”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #229]
[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple]
Terry Maranda won the February vote. I’ve yet to get in touch, but I will try this week and see where we get. Thanks to all Geek Native’s patrons for their support and votes.
The five candidates for next month are;
Voting happens over at Patreon.
Now, some good news or bad news gone away. The Daily Digest email was unpaused last night, I don’t know what I did to fix it; I’ve been trying for days, getting more and more desperate.
The previous email was nearly a week old and had been sent successfully but was still marked as sent in the mail queue. I even tried stopping and starting the system; isn’t that what Rob from IT always says to do?
In the end, I think deleting the last successful but stuck in limbo email might have been the power move needed. Certainly, I got the digest last night. With a bit of luck, we’ll all get it again tonight.
Not limbo, but where do you think Duncan Jones has been since directing the World of Warcraft movie in 2016? He did Mute in 2018, which missed my radar, and that year, his wife gave birth to their second kid, too.
Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones is the son of David Bowie and is now attached to another British treasure. He’s directing a 2000 AD movie. It’s not Judge Dredd. It’ll be Rogue Trooper.
The Machinima movie, that is made from computer game engines, tells the story of one surviving super soldier from a failed invasion on a revenge quest. His gun, helmet and backpack contain the personality of his killed-in-action squaddies.
The cast includes Sean Bean, Matt Berry, Asa Butterfield, Hayley Atwell, and the Rogue Trooper, who will be played by Aneurin Barnard.
I’m keen on a movie Bronwen has been tracking, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Controversially, I liked the female remake and the most recent Afterlife more than Ghostbusters II. Frozen Empire seems to be a mix of the original two and Afterlife.
Not that movie is making is easy and I’m that critical of Ghostbusters II. I had my own awkward experience in front of the camera this week while trying to record a short clip to highlight that Gooey Cube’s The Tomb of Gyzaengaxx is open for registration ahead of its crowdfunder.
I animated some art from the award-winning Shadows in Genzacon, which was a learning curve, and then did a talking headpiece. The main challenge was my dusty fan PC that I’m too timid to fix, and confirm that maybe the fan isn’t entirely straight, because it makes so much noise that the microphone picks it up unless I have the microphone slammed in my face.
Yes, right now, I’m up close and radio personal to the guard on the mic.
Nevertheless, The Tomb of Gyzaengaxx is a collaboration with Luke Gygax and one to watch.
According to one report, it’s getting harder out there in crowdfunding land. Bronwen wrote up Tabletop Analytics report on Kickstarter, which noted revenues are down again. Down 30% compared to the pre-Covid era.
Does this mean we’ve all backed so many board games that we need to stop or run out of space? I honestly think that might be part of it. The dire economic situation might be another, but Kickstarter also has more competitors with companies like GameFound growing and BackerKit launching their own platform.
Kickstarter is no longer sharing its data, and Tabletop Analytics has been collecting the data, perhaps by scraping Kickstarter. This, of course, means they don’t know how much of pledges were actually collected.
Geek Native also collects Kickstarter data just for tabletop roleplaying games and a sample of related campaigns like dice, STL or the occasional gaming table, and this week, we’ve tracked a huge ZineQuest boom.
This week, our Kickstarter Heat score hit 508; last week, it was 181, the highest it had been for weeks. However, in mid-February last year, we got up to 614. So, let’s see what happens for the rest of this month.
There’s a bridge here from Kickstarter money to the lack of money, which caused one Cumbrian student to steal from Games Workshop. Down south, it made local news, with people mocking the young man for ruining his life over ‘plastic dolls’. That’s the term used.
However, the student, who I’m not naming, was depressed; he was living with his partner, whom he relied on for money as a family row, which meant he’d been unable to collect his student loan. He had PTSD due to be beaten and bullied at school.
I’m not saying shoplifting isn’t a crime and that stealing Warhammer models is the same as stealing food to live. Still, I’m glad his sentence was suspended so that if he keeps a perfectly clear track record from now and pleases the authorities, he probably won’t go to jail.
Lastly, I just have one bundle deal to tell you about, and it’s also a Kickstarter that I backed but have yet to play. It’s also a story of how society judges people.
At the Bundle of Holding right now, you can get the Jane Austen-inspired Good Society TTRPG bundle.
On that note, avoid gossip and ghosts, and I’ll see you next week.
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