Welcome home.
It’s November 8th, and the episode title is “Gremlin Disobience”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #308]
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Eric Bleney won the RPG Publisher Spotlight vote this month, and I’ve reached out via the website contact form to arrange an interview. The writer at Eric’s website calls themselves Rick. Let’s find out whether it’s the same person, a successor, a prolific team member, or something else.
There was no Routinely Itemised this week. It’s terrible timing, but first let me tell you what I think the problem is.
Geek Native is a WordPress blog. We have no IT team. There’s just me on the code, and like many in indie news, we rely on plugins from third-party developers to make WordPress sing we dance for us.
We’ve been using a system for years now. When images and other media content are uploaded to Geek Native’s servers, they’re almost immediately whisked off to Amazon’s S3 space, with links and tags automatically updated, all behind the scenes. It saves us loads in hosting fees.
I’m sure there are better ways to do it, but it’s the best solution I’ve found. On Thursday, between posts, and likely due to an automatic update I can’t trace, it stopped working.
We have the offload plugin help desk looking at it. Help desks are busy places, and they’ve agreed we’ve done all we can on our side and, on Friday, will take a look at our staging site. I hope they’ll be back at the task on Monday.
It’s bad timing because this coming week is Scotland Loves Anime in Edinburgh, and I want to review an anime a day and up to four a day on the weekend. That might be a challenge if we can’t upload to the site. However, maybe one of Geek Native’s sister sites can temporarily host the image, and we can hotlink in the short term.
Anyway, there is geeky news to tell you about this week, as we have almost made it four full days before the gremlins struck.
Firstly, we’re launching an unofficial fan poll for the Edinburgh week at Scotland Loves Anime. Go to GeekNative.com/sla-ed where slayed is spelt sla-ed. That’s where you can vote for your favourite anime that aired during Edinburgh Week. You can vote for any anime.
It’s been an interesting week for comic books. First, Neon Ichiban launched and then Sweet Shop.
Neon Ichiban has been set up by David Steinberger and Chip Mosher, two vets from Comixology, but not the Comixology founders, as I once incorrectly said on social media.
Neon Ichiban has pretty much all the big names on board, but I think their innovations come with reselling and remarques of comics. Remarques are a way to make individual digital comics unique.
Sweet Shop has launched with a no-AI policy. It’s all done without venture capital, and I don’t know if that’s by choice, but it does make it attractive, and it launches with many big names on board.
If you started this podcast and liked the anime chat, then it’s Sweet Shop, with manga deals with publishers like Kodansha that might catch your attention.
In more traditional comic book news, the Alan McCullough Collection is heading to auction. It’s estimated at £2 million.
The Alan McCullough Collection is the largest comic book collection ever to go to auction in Europe and has over 100,000 comics. The headline items are some Silver Age issues with the origins of Spider-Man, Iron Man and Thor, such as Tales of Suspense #39, Journey into Mystery #83 and the Amazing Spider-Man #1.
There is RPG news, too. We have the upcoming launch of Two Little Mice’s Twilight Sword RPG. The free preview is out already, and for people who express an interest. Twilight Sword is an anime or JRPG-inspired tabletop and they’re red hot right now, a familiar genre but a welcome contrast to the European fantasy we know through Lord of the Rings and later D&D.
I also had time to review the quickstart for Shadow City Mysteries. This TTRPG is set in a world created by Christopher Mifsud, where colour has gone except for items powered by solargium. Think detective noir meets cyberpunk.
We also wrote up two bundles before the attack of the gremlins. The first is the Monarchies of Mau and perhaps sentient cats, which you can play in this game, would have helped defend our plugins from evil critters.
The second, perhaps harking back to Halloween season, is the seventh year of Tentacles on Bundle of Holding.
That’s us. I really hope the gremlins are back in the box in the next few days. There won’t be a podcast next week as I’ll be at Scotland Loves Anime, and there might not be a Routinely Itemised either. No great for a little news site, but we’ll bear it and struggle on. Thanks for listening.
