Movies reviewed this week: Ascension.

What do you know; it’s a different culture! Um. That was a pretty great trip. It was really satisfying to find out that I’m still able to do a 14 day trip with one bag successfully; I’m getting older but still pretty functional. We saw places I’d never seen, which is always awesome. My backpack was stolen on the way to Budapest (literally from three feet above my head, kudos to the thief) so that was sad, but I had my electronics and passport and credit cards on me at the time so it could have been worse. I’m lucky to be able to take that kind of loss in stride. ...

A casual goal for the Europe two-week trip was trying a one bag approach to packing. Context, in case you’re randomly wandering across this: I’m nearing 50, I’m not in particularly great shape, but I have decent tolerance for roughing it. I’m also in the big and tall category, and was still able to find technical clothing that’d fit (albeit not with a ton of variety). I brought an Osprey Farpoint 55 backpack, which is 55 liters of capacity spread among a main pack and a zip-on day pack. It doesn’t have as many interior compartments as I’d like but I made up for that with some packing cubes and all’s pretty well. I checked mine but I’m pretty sure I could have gotten away with carrying it on the plane. ...

We did a quick two-day visit, which is not all that long, but I think we gave the parks a pretty good once over. Disneyland Paris itself — the castle park — is spectacular. Walt Disney Studios Park is pretty dead but has a couple of excellent rides. And Disney Village is a dull shopping area. As hotels go: I’d kill to have enough money to stay in the Disneyland Hotel casually. It’s literally part of the approach to Disneyland Paris, and it’s gorgeous. Sequoia Lodge was fine: less polish than I’d expected from a Disney hotel but I have no serious complaints. I am really glad we made it out for a two day trip and would recommend it if you’re a big Disney fan and have the ability to get there. In more detail…

Professional wrestling is both a commodity and an art form, and that’s why I can sit in an audience of less than a thousand people in a small ballroom in Tacoma and watch one of the best wrestlers in the world do his job. Will Ospreay is a British wrestler. He’s 26 years old. In 2007, he was a 14 year old watching this Latino kid called Amazing Red, who in turn was wrestling up and down the East Coast in a string of independent promotions and, for a while, in TNA. Whether or not TNA was the big leagues depends on who you ask. Either way, Red had the room to stretch the boundaries of his craft and Will was soaking it all in. He dressed like Red. He recorded YouTube videos of himself replicating Red’s moves. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Ready or Not.

That was sure a couple of movies jammed into one two hour window! And I liked it. Danny Boyle’s a great director working with stylistic flair. The primary beats of the movie are completely fantastic. It’s a dream, perhaps literally: it’s constantly playing with space and time. The titles tell us we’re in Los Angeles before we get there. Conversations don’t miss a beat while characters instantly teleport over the space of miles. Kate McKinnon is playing a Suffolk schoolteacher’s imaginary version of a music executive. It’s a fantasy! If you’re critiquing this movie because it doesn’t make sense, well —

I got a wild hair today and hacked together an issue of the Doskvol Illuminator from my Blades in the Dark game. It took a couple of hours but even for an incompetent graphic designer like me it wasn’t too hard. The tools: Apple Pages and the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society Font and Prop combo pack. The pack comes with a sample newspaper with notes on typography – all you need is that plus a reference plus the fonts, along with any program that will let you shuffle blocks of text around and draw lines. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Long Shot.

Pelgrane Press (original): $50 (print plus PDF, the PDF only version will be released in a couple of months). Hideous Creatures feels like kind of an under the radar release, perhaps because it’s about 50% made up of previously published Ken Hite monographs. At a quick glance, the main text is exactly the same as you got if you bought the monographs, although the book does add a fun handout for each creature. So there’s some retread factor there. ...