schneefink

It's been several months since I regularly watched Critical Role. I started watching ExU: Calamity after I saw the enthusiastic reactions, but stopped after less than two hours because I realized I'm not really in the mood for it and if it's really that great then watching it at the wrong time would be a shame.

But I did watch and enjoy the recent Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable with Matt, Aabria and Brennan. (Major spoilers for Calamity, though they make limited sense without context.) A wonderful mix of interesting talk about DMing from three masters of the craft, and hilarious chaos.

The first season of The Legend of Vox Machina finished and I liked it a lot. I can't be objective about this show because I love the source material so much, but DD hasn't seen the campaign and she enjoyed it too. I love the intro, and the music is stuck in my head.

I haven't watched those specific episodes of the campaign in years, I didn't rewatch them before on purpose so that the direct comparison wouldn't distract me too much, but I thought they did a great job with the adaption, starting with the character designs. The show had many favorite moments, some great ones I'd forgotten, and some that were probably new. I might rewatch the episodes now to see the differences :)

( More spoilery details and some speculation )

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, MCU: The first MCU movie I watched in a while. It was fun. I especially liked the first two fight scenes (while during the big climactic battle I was too exasperated with what people were not doing to fully enjoy it.) Having recently watched Castlevania I also could not help but compare Xu Wenwu to Dracula.

Critical Role campaign 3: I do enjoy CR, the new characters are very promising (especially Taliesin's and Marisha's, and Sam's is fun), but 4 hours a week is a lot. I'm glad they'll take one week a month off, I'm already behind (I've watched the first three episodes so far.) I'm not sure yet if I'll continue watching, or if I'll do what I did for the second half of campaign 2, namely read the summaries each week and then decide to watch the episode if something particularly cool or interesting happened.

Taskmaster series 12: DD and I really enjoyed series 1 to 10, and then for reasons we forgot didn't watch series 11. We recently caught up with series 12 and it's so much fun. Victoria might be one of my favorite contestants ever. Only one more episode to go.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao: People in magical giant robots fight monsters! And the heroine wants to burn down the sexist system that leads to female pilots being sacrificed. ( Some imo minor spoilers )

Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim: inspired by the fairy tale "The Six Swans" in an Asian fantasy setting. Unfortunately the main character left a bad first impression because coddled youngest child or not, a 16-year-old Imperial princess should know more about responsibilities and consequences than Shiori (and that reflects badly on her family too.) Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for YA? None of the plot twists were surprising, and I could only connect to the characters rarely. Overall, I don't regret reading it and it did have some enjoyable elements, but I'm not going to bother with any sequels.

So I'm a Spider, So What?, anime, up to episode 13: I thought this would be mostly silly fun, but, uh, the recent episodes took a much darker tun than I anticipated. Very cool plot twists, ( spoilers ) Without spoilers, I'd appreciate some vague info about how dark this gets.
The first dozen episodes also had surprisingly catchy songs and I'm disappointed those changed.

I enjoyed watching the big battle in last week's episode 140 of Critical Role's campaign 2, and since they said 141 would be the last one I decided to watch the rebroadcast on Friday without spoilers. Even though it was more than 7 hours! (After five hours at the office and three hours of classes, so no surprise that toward the end I started to zone out occasionally.) Brain is foggy today but worth it, it was great. I'm very glad now that even when I stopped regularly watching I still kept up with the plot enough to know what was going on, so I could properly appreciate the ending.

( Notes )

That was great.
I really enjoyed the atonements & second chance themes of this campaign especially. More with the NPCs than the main characters, funnily enough (because Liam tends to wallow a lot and Yasha was never my favorite.) My favorite PC was Beau (followed by Caduceus), but her story and character development was very gradual so there aren't really many singular moments to point to, and I'd have to rewatch a lot to properly appreciate it. Similarly with Fjord.


Coming soon: Vox Machina vs. The Mighty Nein! Vax, Pike, and Scanlan vs. Beau, Jester, and Fjord, with Percy/Molly as the wildcard, everyone at level 15. It will probably come down to Taliesin and how many magic items VM are allowed to use (theirs are a lot more powerful than those of the M9.) Certainly promises to be fun.

Critical Role: I gave up on watching all of it because four hours every week is a lot and I wasn't that invested in the current storyline, but I followed what was happening and when it sounded particularly interesting I watched, and there were some great scenes. (I didn't bother taking notes for all of them, but quite a few.) ( Episode notes: 86, 91-93, 96-98 )


I finally caught up with the Juno Steel episodes of the Penumbra podcast, which I started listening to because I kept seeing intriguing posts about it on Tumblr. It's fun! I don't love it the way I do TMA, but I do enjoy it a lot. Season 2 dragged a bit, but the character development at the end was very nice, and I love the set-up of season 3 so far.
( Thoughts with spoilers )
And of course now there's a hiatus, after the last episode ended on such a cliffhanger!


Thanks to dhampyresa, I also finally started listening to The Mechanisms. I listened to "The Bifrost Incident", "Tales to be Told" and "Once Upon a Time (In Space)" so far and enjoyed it a lot. Everything is space AUs, the tales are tragedies but not in a everything-is-futile way, and the songs are varied and catchy.


And finally, the season 5 trailer of The Magnus Archives is out! I'm so excited for this season! ( spoilers )
Only a few more days.

Two weeks with no new CR 2 and I'm finally caught up again - for the next few hours, at least ^^
(I'm also halfway through Dalen's Closet but I want to be good today and not go to bed late. ...we'll see.)

( notes episodes 73-77 )

Every time I start thinking that season 2 really drags quite a bit in places and I'm not that invested in the plot and it is a huge time investment etc. something drags me back in. Most recently, Beau&Dairon, they are great.

Yesterday I went running for the first time in months :) My mom signed us up for a run at the end of May so I should start training. It was fun and I enjoyed it, and then today I woke up sick again, so it probably wasn't a good idea just yet…

More Critical Role episode commentary:( episodes 54-57 )

Btw, speaking of the chair, I really enjoyed the #CriticalFools Twitter hashtag, about the real CR BBEGs :)

I bought the Cobalt Soul notebook and it's so pretty I barely know what to use it for. Maybe notes/ideas when our next D&D campaign starts. Which is probably soon – speaking of, I want to get a new dice set for the new campaign, I should start looking. If I had a lot more money I could get the dice set CR Kickstarter reward... (Ten episodes funded, it's going to be great.)

I was so nervous about last night's D&D session – as much as I enjoy DMing, I really look forward to being a player again, prep is so stressful every time. Fortunately one of our group is already planning the next campaign. I might cut out an entire sidequest from mine, not sure yet, I'll see how I feel in January. Or after the next session...
I was so nervous about preparing the interior of the temple and then they didn't even enter the temple, the druid just turned into a Giant Raven and kidnapped a cultist from the courtyard. Tactics! Then they interrogated him and almost missed all the relevant information, if I hadn't given them a hint after one of them made an Int check. But all is well that ends well. (Memory being fallible is a problem. For example they were told that the cult is responsible for the kidnapping, but they remembered being told that the kidnapper is a member of the cult, which is different, but when I remind them it's a hint.)
Anyway, now they know that it's most likely ex-cultists behind the kidnapping, because they were unsatisfied that the cult is just passively worshipping and awaiting the apocalypse instead of trying to expedite its arrival. "Weirdest hippie death cult" was my players' final judgment but they liked it xD

The past few Critical Role episodes were fun :) ( episode notes e43-46 )

Guten Rutsch!

I have a new favorite character and I love him. The Mighty Nein are a disaster and I love them too.
(I'm too lazy to look for CR icons so this gets Taako being excited, because he would be.)

( episode notes e31-e39 )

CR s2 fic recs:
Not many, since I rarely get the urge to look for it. Sometimes I still find good stuff though. ( 2 under a cut because of spoilers for episode 26 )

How I currently watch Critical Role: The new episode ends on Friday morning and I usually last between ten and fifty minutes of "maybe I should avoid spoilers" before I give in and read the timeline of CritRoleStats. Depending on what happened I either impatiently wait or almost forget about it until Monday evening, when the new episode is posted on YouTube. The episodes being about 4+ hours long, sometimes I finish watching on Tuesday, but often later, this week for example on Thursday. And then before I had some time to think about it the next episode is out and I feel like I should wait with reactions until I've seen that.

This to explain why I haven't been talking about CR much; also because it took me a while to warm up to the new characters. One of my favourite aspects of Vox Machina was that it was full of found family feelings, and of course you don't have that yet with a bunch of characters who've never met before. (Unsurprisingly, my favourite characters & relationships early on where those who'd met pre-campaign.) Additionally, the players are still getting used to their characters as well (both when it comes to roleplay and abilities.) I finally started to become more invested in the new group around episode 22, and now the latest, 26, was great (despite SPOILER) and I really look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

( very incomplete notes with spoilers )