Quickshots- Westworld

 

Season 1- This is the best thing ever on television

Season 2- Really liked that Raj scene, couldn’t get myself to finish the season

Season 3- Is this thing still on?

Quickshots- Trailblazer

 

Not good.  Palmiotti and Gray have written some great westerns, and this isn’t one of them.  Interesting concept (hitman goes into witness protection that happens to be in the old west) that could have been held up with decent art, but this is like the Rob Liefeld’s understudies got together and decided to try a western.  Ugh. Cover art is great, though!

10 First Impressions of Red Dead Redemption 2

 

 

I’m midway through Chapter 3, here’s the impressions so far:

1. It’s almost like being in Westworld, but instead of $40k/day I bought it on sale for $30.  
2. Customizable Arthur is tons of fun.
3. Although set 12 years earlier, it captures the “end of the frontier” feeling better than the original.  
4. A lot of it plays like a frontier simulator rather than a strict RPG or action game, which I’ve really enjoyed.
5. I haven’t been this attached to characters since the Mass Effect series. 
6. Constantly torn between growing a massive mountain-man beard and shaving it down to a cool yet massive mustache.  In the mean time most of my money has gone to hair tonics.
7. This is probably the best written game I’ve ever played.  
8. One weak point in the writing so far is Dutch; he’s a little less fleshed out than in the original, but then again he was the most engaging character in the original and that’s a hard bar to hit.
9. I still like the early game style of redeye better than the later versions that you learn. 
10. Looks like it’s possible to have an animal hat, buckskin clothes, a mysterious medicine bag, a giant beard, a LeMat and a rolling block Sharpes, and a bandolier of massive bullets, all while riding a giant horse, which means I’ll eventually make Arthur Morgan a twin of Mad Amos Malone.
    

Quickshots- Call Down Thunder

 

I’m aging myself to think that anyone remembers the old Disney movie Davy Crocket and the River Pirates, but if you do you may remember Mike Fink, King of the River.  In that movie Fink was a bully juxtaposed against the good hearted King of the Wild Frontier.  The light but great Call Down Thunder by Kerry Newcomb follows Mike Fink’s career from a young ranger in frontier Pittsburgh to a keelboat captain along the Mississippi through the Red Stick War and Battle of New Orleans.  Fink’s more of the good hearted King in this book, and Newcomb introduces a different sociopathic bully riverman counterpoint that mirror’s Disney’s Fink and serves as the main villain for the story.  Bloody fights, frontier mayhem, and a little bit of sexy times makes for one of my favorite reads.

Gaming notes- As usual, I’ve spent way too much time trying to make Mike Fink as a D&D character (in Pathfinder a good River Kingdoms rogue/ranger/horizon walker or barbarian/river druid, maybe even a skjald if you like the hybrid classes). 

 

Let's Slap Some Bookleather!

 

Recently I stumbled across a ton of vintage grindhouse westerns on several web sites, and thought about putting together a list of links to those movies somewhere.  As I brainstormed ideas it occurred to me- don’t I have a western blog?

Yep, Slap Bookleather is still here, even though it hasn’t been updated since late 2015 (and that was just a few YouTube links, so really mid 2015).  So what happened?

For a time I lost my appreciation for westerns, and it’s certainly come back in the last few months.  Hard to say why, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that I stopped reading westerns the week after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States in the 2016 election, and only returned this summer when it became clear that there was no way that any reasonable person with a moral center would ever vote for decadent real estate huckster and pathological liar who mismanaged the government to the point where COVID could wreck the economy and kill or cripple my friends and family.

(Note: 70 million of you voted for him anyway.  I’ll chalk it up to the fact that I keep hearing people say “amazing, you never heard of anyone actually getting COVID until just a few weeks ago, and now it’s everywhere!”  Well, if you lived between Philadelphia and Boston you spent the Spring watching your friends and family get sick, go on ventilators, and sometimes die, and your hands turned cracked and bloody from constantly sanitizing everything.  New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey have had the virus under control for six months now and we still have the highest per capita death rates- update, the Dakotas just topped us, thanks Sturgis!  We hoped you would learn the lesson from us.  We hoped wrong.)

Regardless, some time in late 2020 a friend reminded me of my former love of westerns and I jumped back in.  You'll see a few pop up again in the next few weeks and months.  Let's see how my tastes have changed.

The Western is Dead... Except for The Revenant, The Hateful 8, and The Ridiculous 6

The Waters are Dark and Full of Horrors! (also, I use also a lot): The Oceans Edition

(The idea for this post came as kayaking season got started this year and everything I read took place on the water, then noticed that there is some freaky stuff in novels, games, and movies that take place on water.  I wrote two posts, then decided that rather than fill what is supposed to be a western blog with nautical horror I would just start a Tumblr of short notes on books and movie... hmm, sounds like how I started this one.  I'm posting the original two this week, and if you like what you see you can read more as it develops over at The Seas are Dark and Full of Horror.)

Take a walk along a New England sea shore.  Go ahead, I dare you, especially if you can do it in a tidal marsh.  You’ll find legs of strange creatures, bits of shell, half-devoured horseshoe crabs, and tentacles off of… something… from the deep.  And that’s just the stuff that washes up, much less what actually survives out there.  No wonder H.P. Lovecraft feared the horrid fishy stench of the unknown depths and turned it into Cthulhu mythology.  (Actually I think it was being raised by a hated pair of spinster aunts and being terrified of their lady parts, plus a mix of standard early 20^th century anti-immigrant xenophobia as well).  None the less, the seas are crazy, and home to terrible sea stories to rival last week’s river tales.

Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games): London has fallen into Hell, which is actually a sunless ocean of eldritch abominations and infernal bureaucracy (and I suspect the inside of the enormous skull of some ancient god, a la No-Space from Guardians of the Galaxy).  Kind of like the Sid Meirs Pirates! games, but resource management includes managing terror and the possibility of eating your crew.  Also, the Mongols got there first and are pissed that London fell on top of Xanadu.  The kind of video game that you would get if you put Verne, Coleridge, Conrad, Lovecraft, and Melville in a room full of programmers and absinthe. 

The Terror (Dan Simmons):  What happened to Arctic exploration vessels that go missing in the long dark nights?  Brilliant writing, that’s what.  Well researched, totally believable, even with the HORRIBLE UNKNOWABLE THING out on the ice (and maybe there is a HORRIBLE UNKNOWABLE THING out on the ice, how do I know? Have YOU ever been on the Arctic ice shelf?  Didn’t think so).  Also, why the fuck would you name an Arctic exploration vessel “The Terror”?  That’s just asking for trouble.  Okay, it's named after a mountain in Antarctica, but it's still a terrible idea.

Black Tide Rising series (John Ringo):  After the Max Brook’s Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars books (very different from the movie), The Walking Dead comics and series, and a million “vet from the Sandbox pops caps into Z’s” novels, how do you make zombie apocalypse tales fresh? By shipping the whole plot out into the ocean!  In Ringo’s four book series the surest way to survive is to take to the sea, and even there people with the zombie virus can turn.  Most survivors are found in groups, locked in sealed compartment after weeks or months at sea.  Also, most of the women who come out of the compartments are pregnant.  What happens in the compartment stays in the compartment.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne):  I haven’t read it since I read the children’s version as a wee youth, but Mrs. Slap just read it and says it’s awesome.  Also, always trust Mrs. Slap.