Did anyone tell @reallyndacarter about the amazing drag queen Pollo Del Mar dressing up as Wonder Woman for her hosting duties at Effy's Big Gay Brunch, an LGBTQ+ wrestling event held during Wrestlemania weekend?

I feel like she would appreciate this fabulousness:

Same

Nobody in this bloody show is straight and I’m living it

THE LOT WRITERS HAVE DEEMED GARY AND CONSTANTINE CONSTANARY

You may have noticed we’ve been on a bit of hiatus. I’ll get this up and running again soon, but in the meantime you can find me over on Instagram being all hipster and artsy. Ciao.

Tattoo Parlor Pick - True At Heart Tattoo

For my birthday I decided to finally get a tattoo I’ve been wanting for a long time - the logo for the Daughters of Cacophony clan from Vampire: The Masquerade. Besides being my favorite clan of all time (still super bummed a viable version of them doesn’t exist in Requiem, Onyx Path), the logo and what it represents pertains to so many things I love, it just seemed perfect for permanent body art for me. RPGS (obviously), World of Darkness specifically (I’ve been a GM for a local WoD gaming club for over 5 years now), 90s goth subculture (my people!), music (the Daughters’ powers revolve around using music to affect people, particularly with vocals, and music is a very important part of my life), and it’s a relatively obscure clan of a somewhat obscure RPG (I mean, not in geek circles, but it’s not exactly D&D either), so it appeals to my hipster geek side. I’ve been wearing the logo in pin form on my jackets for years. So, after much deliberation, I finally got this beauty permanently inked on my left calf.

After much research online and chatting with my inked friends, I settled on True At Heart Tattoo - they had good reviews around the interwebs, when we visited the shop, I liked what I saw (fun decorations, clean stations, seemed pretty busy, which I consider a good sign) and the people there were friendly and personable, plus I went through the portfolios available for the artists and totally fell in love with the work of Hugo Vega, the artist that I ended up working with. I feel kinda bad because this is a logo and not an original piece, but I wanted to make sure I was working with an artist I could trust to take my request seriously and get the details right on the lips, like the subtle fang on the left. I think he did a great job! Plus the experience itself was great - Hugo was very professional but friendly, which both put me at ease during the session, but also made things seem really fast. It’s much easier to forget about the pain part when you are having pleasant conversation during the process. Next week David is getting an original piece by Hugo, so I’ll document that for you more extensively, but I wanted to make sure to give this shop and Hugo in particular a shout out. This was a great way to start my birthday weekend.

Movie Pick - Afflicted

I am generally not a fan of “found footage” or “YouTube” style movies or most horror films. I am however a fan of thoughtful, well executed indie films and vampire movies in general. That second part probably seems like a contradiction, but I would argue that a well done vampire movie has way less to do with gore or shocking moments, and way more to do with exploring the human condition and our fear of death, sex, and disease. Especially in combination with one another. Afflicted has all those great points in spades - so much that I am almost sad to give away that is a vampire movie. The movie explores two best friends trying to fulfill a dream of traveling the world and also making videos that share the joy of exploring Europe with their followers online. However, they get way more excitement than they bargained for in what I would argue is one of the most realistic portrayals of what it would look like if vampires were real and you had to deal with the consequences of becoming one (yes, it’s a spoiler, but it’s a spoiler that’s in the trailer, and the movie does not in any way suffer from you knowing that going into it). The whole movie is beautifully shot, has some amazing action sequences for being a low budget indie movie that would have been worthy of a studio film, and overall was way less shaky cam than I thought it would be. It is far more a peer of Cloverfield than it is of Paranormal Activity. I would especially recommend it to anyone either writing this type of genre fiction or running a World of Darkness Vampire game - the way the story unfolds is just insanely well done. It really made me want to step up my game when I run my own Vampire The Requiem game here in a few weeks. Great movie to watch to get prepared for that. Super thumbs up from me. Do yourself a favor and either stream it or pick it up on Blu Ray. (Hat tip to the amazing Girl on Guy Podcast that brought this movie to my attention - also the interview Aisha did with the makers of Afflicted is awesome and you should totally listen to it after you watch the movie. Or before, whatever.)

Book Pick - You’re Never Weird on The Internet (Almost)

Felicia Day has long been in my list of personal heroes. As a girl geek that once aspired to be a film maker/artist/writer/actress, she’s has done a ton of cool things I would love to do, all while being quirky and awkward and positive and just all around coming across as the sort of person it would be fun to spend the day with. So I did, sort of, by downloading the audio book version of her memoir “You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)” and listening to it while doing boring math things in a cubicle all day. If I felt like I could relate to Felicia before, that was nothing to the feeling of “I totally relate to that!” feeling I got over and over and over again while listening to her book. The great thing is she narrates the audio book, so it’s like listening to her tell you all about her life over coffee or something. She’s candid, she’s funny, she has great stories about the various cool things she’s done, but most importantly, she’s very inspiring. There is something very encouraging about the way Felicia tells her story, as if she is delightfully self aware of her lucky breaks and hard work, but also has this “and you could accomplish things too!” attitude that I love. It’s the sort of book that you read and it makes you want to dust off all your half finished projects and make some magic happen. I especially appreciated her candid sharing of her most recent struggles, which I think has been a great trend in the last year or so in the geek celebrity circles - I think the second to last chapter was incredibly brave of her, and made me want to give her a hug and a high five all at once. (Which I think might be physically impossible? Unless you are an octopus. Or Gordo?) Overall, I highly recommend whichever version of the book you choose to pick up - it was an insightful and fun look at how Felicia has gone about making the world a more fun place.

I need this skirt. I need it more than bunnies. Or at least before Las Vegas By Night. SQUEE!

50 Shades of Grey (Reprise)

Saw some feedback on my earlier post.

First, it’s a fair point that I haven’t read the books yet. I actually ordered them from Amazon and mildly dread their arrival since, as I said, I didn’t particularly enjoy the bits I read.

Second, it sort of misses the point, which was that it’s sad to see a random author be pilloried on the web because they wrote a book that they and a lot of other people enjoyed. There seems to be this weird idea that 50 Shades is an advice book or relationship manual when it’s basically porn, and porn is full of horrible ideas that don’t work in real life. Also plenty of vanilla romantic comedies are full of unhealthy relationships and whatnot. 

But we shall see upon reading...

~MightyDave

DJ Pick - DJ Amanda Jones

On Saturday night we went on a rare date night/field trip to Bar Sinister in Los Angeles with a couple friends. Bar Sinister is pretty awesome on it’s own, certainly worthy of it’s own post, but today I thought I’d highlight one of my favorite DJ’s, Amanda Jones, who did two sets on Saturday. I really like it when we can catch her sets because Amanda plays a great mix of my gothy favorites from high school like Depeche Mode and NIN, more current gothy favorites like Aesthetic Perfection and VNV Nation, as well as the occasional song that isn’t really gothy but does get the dance floor moving. She posts her set lists on her Facebook, if you are curious. (This is also helpful the next day when you can’t get a song of your head, but you don’t know what song that was.) If you are in the greater Los Angeles area and have a chance to catch her at a club, I highly recommend it. 

-BurgandySkies

Part of me wants to stop watching Gotham... but somehow I know I will be in fall. 

Introducing Gotham's Tigress

Introducing Gotham’s Tigress

Introducing Gotham’s Tigress Jessica Lucas Gotham season 2 casts Jessica Lucas (Gracepoint) as new villain Tigress. TVLine reports that Lucas will play Tabitha Galavan, a,k,a Tigress, a violent but attractive criminal that wields a whip Michelle Pfeiffer style. Tabitha will be the lead enforcer for her Billionaire brother Theo, who aspires to takeover Gotham City. Earlier today, Lucas tweets:…

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EL James

I’ve never ready 50 Shades Of Grey in its entirety and I doubt I ever will because I didn’t like the bit I read. 

But ever since it has come onto my personal radar I’ve noticed people flaming on it and generally being kind of jerks about it. The excuse people tend to use is that they glorify abusive relationships and whatnot. Here’s the thing, though - the bondage parts of 50 Shades that I’ve read are incredibly gentle compared to, say, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty series.

The odds that this book will make random people be kidnapped and sexed up by billionaires with mommy issues seem pretty firmly in the against category. And in exchange for protection against this “risk” people make constant fun of a book series a lot of people enjoy. 

There’s also a tendency to call them fanfiction due to their origins. But so what? Why do people write fanfiction if not to one day succeed? Good for EL James, I say. And people should stop being assholes.

Someone else’s thoughts with a little more experience with this phenomena can be found here. 

~MightyDave

Awesome :D

#LoveWins

I’m going to Zombee Donuts this weekend. I endorse any kind of geek-flavored restaurant, at least a little. However, these particular donuts are incredibly excellent and thus would be good even if they weren’t geeky. Just good, good stuff. Even the plain old chocolate bars have really, really good chocolate.

GO THERE

~MIghtyDave

YouTube Pick - Meets Metal

331Erock (aka Eric Calderone) is one of my favorite musician YouTubers. Not content to simply show off his shredding skills, he also does some amazing metal versions of songs both popular and geeky, usually in costume or with cool visuals in the background as befits whatever song he’s doing (i.e. the time he dressed up like Daredevil for a metal interpretation of the Netflix show’s theme song). It’s both highly entertaining and often pretty genius. I’ve downloaded more than a few of his “meets Metal” tracks (which he makes available for free) for my gym playlists. Up top is something akin to YouTube Inception (if you haven’t watched the incredible original video for Crystallize, watch it here), and below is one of his older videos for the original Conan theme which is how we stumbled across his channel in the first place. (We were playing a Conan the Barbarian RPG game at the time using the Fate Accelerated rules. It was awesome, but you had a to be there.)

Loca the Pug

So on Facebook I Liked a group that has the best of Tumblr and they posted this video so I had to click over to Youtube and get the embed and put it back on here. Hooray for the future?

Witcher 3

I’ve been playing Witcher 3 forever and it seems like it will never end. This isn’t a bad thing by any means, by the way. I love this game. I’ve occasionally mentioned it here and there but haven’t formally reviewed it, largely because I haven’t finished it yet. It’s been a good time.

So far I’ve mostly been enjoying the open world bits, just because I like exploration and finding my way around the game world. However, last night I played through a really amazing sequence, as posted above. For a little while, this game actually made me feel like I was out getting hammered with a coupe of good friends, which is something I’m at least a bit familiar with. It was really something unique in gaming to me so far, because it was so well done and I really had that nostalgic/competitive/friendly feeling. It was also hilarious.

~Mighty Dave