March 2025 Newsletter

A full and eventful February has come to a close at Ranged Touch, which means it's time for the newsletter roundup for all our various shenanigans! Coming near the end, CMRN and Danni dropped the monthly pod as usual, discussing their adventures in miniatures, among other things. Tabletop games, they're still here! They're still happening!

For GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES, CMRN and Michael delved deep in Rockstar Games with Sara Humphreys' book MANIFEST DESTINY 2.0, which creatively uses genre analysis to press upon and question the meaning of big genre-world blockbuster games in ways that are often productive, and sometimes frustrating. It's a great talk, and the book is on our Bookshop page, where you WILL NOT find next month's offering–because it's a movie! We'll keep the Rockstar train rolling, sort of, by discussing the recently released machinima film GRAND THEFT HAMLET.

If the profusion of new technologies like "streaming films" and "videogames" seems to be too much for you, well, I'm sorry to say that last month JUST KING THINGS offered no safe harbor, covering Steve's cell phone zombie apocalypse novel CELL, which is really odd but surprisingly prescient and quite good, while over on the bonus feed they watched the film adaptation, which is just straight up bad by almost every conceivable metric. After that (old info to the RT cognoscenti by the time they read this) they'll tackle the dark fantasy romance novel LISEY'S STORY and its Apple TV adaptation.

SHELVED BY GENRE soldiered on with Austin Walker, continuing to work through William Gibson's SPRAWL TRILOGY. That consisted of finishing the excellent NEUROMANCER and then starting in on the tonally wild COUNT ZERO. To round it out, we also had a Bonus Ep on the equally unusual Abel Ferrara adaptation of Gibson's story NEW ROSE HOTEL, for all those who were curious what a cyberpunk movie that didn't believe in cyberpunk would be like. Next month, we'll finish off ZERO, continue with MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, and drop a bonus ep on the 1995 cult classic movie STRANGE DAYS, so look forward to that!

Thanks so much for supporting Ranged Touch, and as always, thanks to Jordan Mallory, our stalwart producer, who we can employ thanks to you and who provides so much of the excellent audio you pipe into your ears. Catch you next time here on the ole Newsletter Feed, and keep your stick on the ice.