#Ranged Touch

[chip-and-ironicus]

The long-awaited Zork LP has begun! This is the first of three parts, making good on the pledge we made on Ranged Touch's 2022 Prepare to Give stream benefitting The Brigid Alliance.

A lot of people are more familiar with this game than we are, and have said some very intriguing things about the sequels. Grant has promised to play (not Let's Play) Zork 2 for himself if another $5,000 is raised for The Brigid Alliance between now and the end of the day part 3 is posted. Just share an image of your donation confirmation and we'll total them up. At time of posting we're over 25% of the way there already!

[blazing-spectre]

Now that it is 413, I am here to recommend one of my favourite podcasts of all time, Homestuck Made This World. Whether you like Homestuck or not, whether you have read it or will not go near it for the rest of your life, it is worth a listen. Especially for tumblr aka the media literacy website lol

It has forever changed how I interact with media

[demonbismuth]

by Shelved by Genre

[galaxseacreature]

Me, finishing The Shadow of the Torturer:

Wow, lotta weird stuff crammed in those last few chapters at the end! Can't wait to listen to Shelved by Genre and see what they make of it

Shelved by Genre:

[windowsloth]

realized I might as well post this here too—inspired by the lengthy tangent on the last recent episode of Shelved by Genre, when cmrn calls for art of Father Inire���s St. Bernard style humanimals

[dinosaurgiantpenny]

Uncle Stevie gets it.

[ewingstan]

If you enjoyed or were horribly displeased by my Hallmark posting, consider giving Shelved by Genre a listen. It’s a great podcast that covers genre fiction series in discrete units, with impressive analysis and contextualization. They’ve done units on Book of the New Sun and Earthsea, and are about to start a Junji Ito unit I’m really excited for (finally have a good excuse to read Tomie), but they’ve also done single-episode interstitials covering Hallmark movies. Their recent episode on The Good Witch was phenomenal, and somehow ended up including very interesting information about the Icon comics line. Give it a listen.

[taravangianlistenstothebeachboys]

For all the fans that follow me for the nebulous group of fandoms I post about that can only be grouped as “genre fiction,” I heartily recommend the new podcast “Shelved By Genre.” It’s done by Ranged Touch, a network also known for Homestuck Made This World, Game Theory Study Buddies, Just King Things, etc, and I definetly recommend checking out their other stuff if you haven’t.

It does deep-dives into representative genre fiction series, with their first episode discussing the first six chapters of Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book in his The Book of the New Sun series. I started reading it so I could listen along to the podcast, and I think that fans of The Locked Tomb will get a lot out of the series. It shares a similar place of genre weirdness as tlt, with court intrigue, sword and sorcery, and far-future sci-fi elements mixed together for a very unique world. It has a similar willingness to mix “literary” and “low-brow” references throughout, with pulp fiction, Proust, and obscure Catholic saints being its major touchstones. It’s main character Severian comes from a similar tradition as Gideon and Harrow in being raised as part of an alien and feared religious tradition which he has a complicated relationship with. Wolfe and Muir share a similar tendency for narrators who don’t give much detail about what they’re not focused on, often at the expense of the reader’s understanding of the plot, which encourages a reading style that Harrow fans especially will be familiar with. I would not be surprised if Wolfe is an influence on Muir. All this to say, tlt fans should definitely check out book of the new sun, and they should listen to Shelved By Genre as they do it.

[citrusandsalt]

So was anyone going to tell me Michael Lutz, Cameron Kunzelman, and Austin Walker have a new pod on genre fiction or was I supposed to find it out doing my semiannual google of the wizard's quarter in an attempt to remember what length of a work it refers to

[fraenum]

THAT WAS THE SECRET

[humanmorph]

The audio drama adaption for Chapter 24 of The Claw of the Conciliator, 'Dr. Talos' Play: Eschatology and Genesis', is live!

Here's a direct link to it on the Ranged Touch website, but I definitly recommend reading Grant's introduction to the project on Cohost (aswell as the production diary, which I found pretty interesting)!

[chip-and-ironicus]

I was asked to create an audio drama adaptation of a chapter of The Book of the New Sun, so I did, and it's here, and I'd really like people to listen and enjoy it. But like I was saying to a friend earlier this week, the content is not really interested in onboarding you, the listener. So I thought I'd make an introductory post to give people a handle on what this is and what's going on:

Listen to the audio drama Production Diary posts so far Poster by Gryme

Why it exists In the early 1980's Gene Wolfe published a dying earth/science fantasy cycle called The Book of the New Sun. It's presented as a memoir of the main character, Severian the Torturer, and contains a few other stories he encounters or tells along the way. Chapter 24 of the second volume, The Claw of the Conciliator, is in the form of a script for a play he performs in, written by a supporting character he encounters several times on his journey. This is a mostly word-accurate adaptation of that script into a dramatic presentation, which, as far as anyone involved knows, is the first of its kind. That's really exciting!

What's happening in its context In his journeys, Severian performs in this play twice, once each near the end of the first and second volumes of BotNS. The author, Dr. Talos, sees his play as both an outlet for his creative drive, a means of communicating more profound truths than he could in another medium, and part of a scam. They end their performances by having a cast member seem to go mad and attack the audience, then the troupe picks over and loots whatever the crowd left behind. The world of the greater narrative is in decline, a slow apocalypse of stagnant millennia, which informs the work.

What's happening in the play Eschatology and Genesis is about the rebirth of the world, and is set during the final death of the one its characters and audience live in. Religious and mythic figures arrive to witness and influence the new world coming, and mortals of various social positions are left to deal with the facts one way or another. The language is archaic and dense, but I think the cast's performance brings out what's meant, or at least the interpretation we settled on. A lot of the conventions of pre-modern and early modern theater are here, so if you remember anything from a Shakespeare unit in high school then parts of this will be familiar.

Please enjoy the show. And if you do, please spread it around. A lot of people worked very hard to make this possible, and I only hope my audio production didn't let down their contributions.

[senalishia]

y'all, if you love baldur's gate 3 (or any crpgs set in Forgotten Realms, really) you have to listen to the podcast Mages and Murderdads. these guys have done playthroughs with commentary of all the baldur's gate games (and more) and they are HILARIOUS

[fourteenfifteen]

ik it’s a joke but a shelved by genre season where they read a bunch of dostoevsky would be fucking sick

[fuckitfireeverything]

does anyone who is in the Ranged Touch discord know what Claw of the Conciliator chapters are up for the next episode?

[vforvalensa]

lmao