Out of Pod Experience

Well said mate, indeed.

Black desert isn't bad

I support any game with the balls (lol) to blatantly dong it up. About time. I played AoC for a time. Had it's moments. And it's running jokes. "How do you know if a player is actually a real girl?" "Look for the ones with all their clothes slots equipped." 😂

Haven't logged in to buy one I like I suppose!

Thanks Herzog. I am among my own there, I feel better now.

Speaking of good pulp, we need a good game based on Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Or probably better yet, just a good TV series based on the stories. Fritz, that's another genius, but a merry prankster one.

I like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser too. I was reading them with a smile on my face.

Nice! I too am a fan of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, as well as the Elric of Melniboné stories by Michael Moorcock. If you guys are into that kind of pulp fiction, and if you like Lovecraft and Howard, you have to check out the work of Clark Ashton Smith. He is like the perfect mixture of Howard and Lovecraft and, in my opinion, a better write than either of them. His fantasy stories are unlike anything you've ever read. And they also tie in with the Cthulu Mythos and, I believe, the Hyborian Age. He has stories from Atlantis, which he calls Poseidonis, and post-apocalyptic stories. It's pure fantasy.

Definitely agree about Moorcock. He's a huge inspiration for me because, like you said, his concepts and stuff are so appealing, even on a visual level. Very mythical, if that is the word. The problem with Moorcock though is the very inconsistent writing. I've only finished the first two books in the "saga", even though I have the rest of the original six book collection and I sometimes leaf through them in fascination, but still, at times his writing is pretty much garbage. Even when it's good, it's never far from being bad. Yet that's somehow part of the appeal. It is, after all, pulp fantasy fiction from the sixties.

Whenever that movie gets made some day, I envision is being something like Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, not just because of that albino boss dude, but just because of the overall gothic feel and stuff. Actually, that makes me wonder why Guillermo del Toro hasn't already made it. What's he waiting for? **** it, let's make the Elric movie, us guys right here in this forum thread... seriously... But also, like you, I've always envisioned Elric as a cartoon, not sure why - probably just fits with the cheesy fantasyness of the whole thing.

Moorcock also wrote music for (and played with? not sure) Blue Oyster Cult, one of the sickest bands ever. Their songs "Black Blade" and "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" are supposed to be about Elric / the Eternal Champion. Which is just so damm cool that it's almost fuk'd.

I've checked out those Amber books a few times but they just never really grabbed hold of me. Granted, I only read, like, the first page, but I have a strange sense of artisticness. I feel like I can sniff a book and tell if I'm gonna like it or not. There's just this feeling I get when I know I'm gonna like something, it's weird. Then again, I'm a bit older now, so maybe I'll like it now. That happens, happened to me a lot. We'll see, maybe.

As for Smith, I think you can find pretty much all of his stuff for free now. Some of the physical copies are pretty expensive these days. I have two copies of his works, the collections Lost Worlds and Out of Space and Time, both hardcover reprints from 1971. I got them when I was like sixteen (ordered them online) and threw away the dust jackets (probably not a smart move) but I don't think I would give them away for anything. I just sniff them all day (no girlfriend). They're beautiful. I'd recommend checking out any of the stories from either one of those collections.

Also regarding what you said earlier about the Laurentiis (or whatever) Conan film. I grew up loving that movie, still do to a certain extent. It was pretty epic. But I definitely feel your frustration. I'm not necessarily a huge Howard fan. His stuff was always mostly stiff and boring to me, but I did like some of the stories like the Tower of the Elephant which you mentioned earlier. I also leaped with silly enthusiasm into the story Red Nails, thinking that "red nails" probably referred to, like, human nails that were covered in blood (which is still a better idea; someone should remix Red Nails to involve that theme) but it turns out Howard's "Red Nails" is about literal metal nails that are painted red - wtf is this crap? I pictured someone clawing out their own eyeballs with blood-covered nails and he gives me a coffin with nails in it? But whatever. It was a while ago, I can barely remember reading it.

My dad is one of those people who thinks he knows Conan because he saw the movie. Unlike him, I actually read some of the original stories. But he thought that the novelization of the Dino De Laurentiis film was the original Conan story, because on the cover it said "by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp" and I had to pretty much argue with him, like, no, they just put his name there because he created the character, he didn't actually write that. He was dead a long time ago. He wrote the real stories in the thiries, etc. Since he was kind of an authority figure for me most of my life I thought he probably knew more than I did, but no, he was just mistaken on that one.

Same thing happened when I realized that he thought the Necronomicon was a real book created by Lovecraft (like a real "occult" book). I had to explain to him again that it was a fictional book within Lovecraft's stories that didn't actually exist - even though plenty of books were called the "Necronomicon" later on, with or without his name, but they were usually just stories or whatever, not the "real" Necronomicon. Then again, maybe it does exist... maybe it's out there somewhere... who has the answers? What does it all mean??

Yeah this game should be good though o/

I'm glad somebody else thinks Moorcock is a great dreamer guy, but kind of an awful writer. His books were so popular when I was in high school, I thought I was the only weirdo who thought he couldn't really write. Same as I'm glad that that blogger guy also thinks Howard is kind of quasi-literature.

Maybe check out "Red Nails" again someday, mate. It's one of Howard's best, IMO. See, there's this city, but it's all inside one big building with no windows. Some kind of glowing mineral lights it. And there are two tribes in there, kind of like Aztecs or Toltecs, and they're constantly warring on each other. One of them has this horned skull thing that a guy wears as a helmet, and it mesmerizes people if they look at it, so he can kill them easy. So Conan and this hot pirate woman Valeria come in there to escape some giant jungle reptiles, and....

I still have the Marvel Comics oversized special edition of "Red Nails," illustrated by the mighty Barry Windsor-Smith. It came out about the same time as Blue Oyster Cult's first album.

Yeah maybe I'll check it out again. I was petty young when I first read it.

Also it's really frustrating how much technology has advanced, yet there's still hardly any good games. What da fook.