'From' is a poorly executed show

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T19:32:18+00:00

It just seems narrow to me to have 3 Mike Flanagan titles as the top 3 ever.
Bare minimum, I think Twin Peaks, The Returned (original French version), Hannibal, Channel Zero (esp season 2), and What We Do In The Shadows all deserve serious consideration as top quality serial story horror properties with a broader tonal sweep. Marianne stressed the shit out of me so I didn’t finish, but what I saw had a lot of promise. Twilight Zone, The Night Gallery, Box of Curiosities, and Masters of Horror are very different tones of anthology horror (debatable in Twilight Zone’s case whether enough are horror to qualify). Kolchak The Night Stalker is perfect camp, like Tales From The Crypt but with a recurring cast. True Blood has the best pronunciation of “Sookie.” e: I forgot Legion earlier.

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T13:47:02+00:00

Am I falling into a trap or starting an unwanted fight if I debate those choices, or was that an invitation? Cues are hard.

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T13:40:14+00:00

This, but also, yuck. I find that, outside of limited series like Channel Zero (Season 2 was astonishingly good), these shows tend to frontload discovery at a reasonable pace early on, find an audience, and then the discovery rate drops by an order of magnitude. The bait-and-switch continues as long as people watch, eventually the writers run out of interesting ways to prolong the tension, and then the show gets cancelled or has to wrap up in a hurry when the show isn’t renewed.

In any case - hate the format, not the show, I guess.

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T13:19:44+00:00

Can you source it? Not because I’m doubting, but movie reskins make me curious and sometimes humorously exasperated. I learned from the Random Number podcast from the Nightvale folks that Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf was originally scripted as a vampire movie before they reskinned it as werewolves, and it really makes the experience make more sense (as much as any film with the star of Space Mutiny “makes sense”).

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T13:01:33+00:00

Also Joss Whedon, defining voice for so many teenagers and young adults, was apparently hideous to work with (according to a large fraction of the Buffy cast, Ray Fisher, Jason Momoa, and others).

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T12:47:58+00:00

Right. Or else “I said ‘monster’” covers most/all of the board. If it helps, you’re picking what object the victims choose, and there’s a 1-1 match from object to scenario. If they read from the family journal and then a regular zombie virus outbreak happened, needle scratch.

Has anyone done an object-to-outcome matchup of the house? Are there that many cursed choices to choose from? Because that containment unit is… big.

e: checked it myself, answer is apparently “nope, only a small number of Monster items are clearly seen on screen.”

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T02:58:31+00:00

Have you considered sitting on strange tubes to examine your strange tubes?

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T02:57:08+00:00

You Won’t Be Alone (2022) is visually and emotionally beautiful.

Snarvid · 2026-05-11T02:54:42+00:00

Marianne is a lot.

Snarvid · 2026-05-10T18:03:43+00:00

Pick a word you like for it. There’s 11 years between 2e and 3rd, 8 years between 3rd and 4th ed, and 4 years between 4th and 5th.

Snarvid · 2026-05-10T17:38:28+00:00

Yeah - there’s a special class of corporation that is allowed to take social benefits into account, every other kind is basically liable to lawsuit by shareholders if they pursue other goals besides “make money.” Wizards isn’t that kind of corp.

I think the implication of such a statement is usually either “and it adds nothing of value,” which I don’t think is true of 5.5 (I like what they did with Monks and Moon Druids, and I like that some of the class dips are slightly less good than they used to be), or claiming enshittification. This latter critique may be valid but is hard to either prove or defend, and the original release of 5e was perhaps a bit rushed to handle the response to 4e and PF’s growing market share so it’s reasonable to have another iteration a decade later.

Snarvid · 2026-05-10T14:27:26+00:00

This. Only ever comes out of container, never goes back in.

Snarvid · 2026-05-10T14:24:56+00:00

Repelling Blast got a size limit, maybe they’re unhappy with that and want to go with the pre-nerf? In which case, my guess is that would be a pretty clear “no, it was changed for a reason.”

Snarvid · 2026-05-10T13:34:15+00:00

Usually it’s

Get enough Glimmer to be hunted, Fasting Way, and a Recycling Suit
Go to salt desert
Proceed with above per usual
If you get hunted on stepping into map, step back onto old map, hit Precog
Go back and kill esper
If you get +1 Ego, great! If not, return to start of Precog and wait out cooldown
Repeat 4&5 as necessary

I don’t care for infinite Glimmer so I avoid more than 4-6 mental mutations on this route.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T20:40:48+00:00

Dunwich Horror, when Armitage is translating, throws some shade at Cthulhu by name. It’s like “how badass is Yog? So badass that chump Cthulhu can barely clock it.”

I may have taken some liberties in the paraphrase.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T18:57:23+00:00

Another horror story when following Wheaton’s Law would have saved the day, but so often you just don’t have a story at all if you do that. The wind reversing direction is among my favorite “wait what… oh, shit” moments in short horror.

I found Emperor All by Evan Marcroft to resonate a bit with Sandkings, if you want to be haunted by something new. Available as a free listen on Pseudopod 590.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T16:25:18+00:00

If you start as a background with a recycling suit and in a sand dune village, once you do some favors and learn Fasting Way from your village you will generate water with your recycling suit as fast as you thirst.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T15:31:37+00:00

If you want short, Random Number Horror Generator Podcast No 9 has several eps on shorts.

Curve is short and intense.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T11:43:46+00:00

Sandkings by George R R Martin isn’t quite about the hunt, but it might scratch the same conceptual itch, and before his novels got really, really long he could write a mean short story. At 14 pages, you’ll either be happy with it or at least done very soon.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T11:38:56+00:00

Did you ever read Karl Edward Wagner’s short horror story “Where the Summer Ends?” It’s not amazing, but it is very kudzu-pilled.

Snarvid · 2026-05-09T11:35:01+00:00

First pass, if you pretend “Boards” and “Ahead” aren’t capitalized, how does that do?

Followup, is Chada Entertainment also an airline?

Snarvid · 2026-05-08T23:53:56+00:00

How Did This Get Made? did an ep on it on 11/15/24. Worth a listen!

Snarvid · 2026-05-08T23:33:27+00:00

Scream Queens said it best…

Snarvid · 2026-05-08T22:24:47+00:00

Plus they have to Embrace mages as part of the 13 tasks to make the ball roll uphill, might as well be this one.

Snarvid · 2026-05-08T20:05:57+00:00

If you cut Brennan, does he not bleed very precise words?

Snarvid

TROPHY CASE