The Eternaut
Based on a comic of the same name, this Argentine Netflix series follows a group of friends trying to survive a deadly snowfall in Buenos Aires. That sounds stupid, but I assure you it’s pretty awesome. The snow is not radioactive exactly, but it is poisonous in some mysterious way. If it touches you, you die. The snow begins to fall in the middle of the night, while our heroes are gathered together playing cards. There is a harrowing moment early on when day breaks and they realize some of their neighbors have survived. At first, they wave to their neighbors, trying to get their attention. This quickly turns to horror as they realize they’ve caused their neighbors to open their windows to see what’s going on, only to be killed by the snow.
Buy THE ETERNAUT, BENEATH THE ETERNAL SNOW: The Legacy of OesterheldThe snow has somehow caused most electronic equipment, including their phones, to stop working. At first, our heroes concern themselves with basic survival – making sure they have enough food and water, securing the doors and windows to ensure no snow gets inside, etc. But several of them are also worried about family members who are not there with them.
Eventually, they make a sort of snow suit with waterproof jackets, a snorkeling mask, rubber gloves, etc, and venture outside. They need to look for survivors and gather supplies. Quickly, they realize that not everyone is as kind and willing to cooperate as they are. It is a The Walking Dead-type scenario with factions forming that are only out for themselves.
At the end of the third episode, something happens. I won’t spoil it, but it changes what the entire series is about. At first, I was annoyed by this. I was really enjoying watching these characters learn how to survive a snowy apocalypse. But by the end of the next episode, I was completely on board. The series had shifted, and I would have enjoyed what it was doing for a lot longer, but I was definitely digging where it was going.
I continued to do so for the rest of the season. It has already been picked up for Season Two, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Art of Defense
I’m a big fan of tower-defense games. That’s where you defend a base from a series of attacks. Typically, the enemy will have a winding path to march towards the base. Along the way, there will be stations where you mount your defense with a series of different towers. Each game is different, but usually there will be 4-5 types of towers. There is your basic tower, which fires weak projections at a rapid pace. The next tower will be more powerful, but it fires at a slower speed. Then there is an air-defense tower. Sometimes, there will also be a tower that fires at both land and air enemies. And oftentimes, there will be one mighty tower that fires incredibly powerful projectiles at a rather slow speed. Often, there is a tower that sprays fire or acid. The amount of damage this does is small, but rather than firing single shots every few seconds, it inflicts constant damage for the entire time the enemy is within range. Finally, there is a tower that slows the speed of your enemies, allowing them to be hit by your weapons more times as they pass by a tower.
Buy Siege of Valeria Board GameYou purchase towers (and upgrade them) with cash the game gives you at the start of each level, and that you accumulate by destroying enemies. The fun of these games is deciding which towers to use, where to put them, and when to upgrade them.
Art of Defense adds a few choice changes, making it my all-time-favorite, tower-defense game. Unlike most games of its sort, there are often more than one tower to defend per level and multiple paths your enemies can take. This gives you a lot more options in terms of setting up your defense and choosing your enemy’s path (you can often block certain paths by placing towers in their way).
Once you have beaten a level in the normal way, you can also choose “Escape” mode, in which the enemies start from your base and try to escape the board from their usual starting point. There is also a “Fog” mode, which obscures most of the board with an opaque fog. You can only place towers in visible spaces (and once you do, a small portion surrounding that tower becomes visible). This makes choosing your routes much more difficult. Once you defeat each of those levels, there is a “Survival” mode which keeps throwing increasingly difficult droves of enemies at you for as long as you can last.
It also uses a certain amount of role-playing ideas with several built-in heroes you can place on a tower to give it extra power and abilities. You can earn different supplies that allow you to increase each tower throughout the game. And if you win a level without allowing a single enemy to breach your tower, you get a little badge. I can’t tell you how much it excites me to get those badges.
With most tower-defense games, I get bored after a week or so because they don’t offer a lot of interesting challenges beyond their basic gameplay, but I’ve been playing Art of Defense now for months, and I still love it.
David Byrne – “Everybody Laughs”
Buy David Byrne – Who Is The Sky? CDThe former Talking Heads frontman has just announced a new album, Who is the Sky, and with it, he’s released this new video. It is such a David Byrne song and a David Byrne music video, and I love it. The music has this great percussive beat with strings and periodic horns. Over the top are Byrne’s half-spoken, half-sung vocals with great sing-along lyrics. The video scrolls sideways with an eclectic group of people acting out bits of the lyrics while bouncing and dancing. By the end, they are all singing the song and exuding all the joy. It is a singular, glorious thing, and it makes me very happy. The new album drops September 5.
Devil in the Deep Blue Sea
I grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was raised in the Church of Christ, which I sometimes call evangelical adjacent. We held a lot of the same theology and politics as the mainline evangelicals, but differed enough in doctrine and stubborn enough in principle to not align ourselves with them. Other evangelical denominations often joke that the Church of Christ believes that they are the only ones going to heaven (as a teen, I often quipped that I didn’t even think half the members of the CofC were going to get there either).
Because of this independent nature (and a strictness in certain doctrinal principles), we tended not to party with the evangelicals culturally. At least my family didn’t, anyway. During this period, evangelicals began creating their own culture, making their own music, books, and even television series. While my mother frowned on certain R-rated movies, and she once lectured me for ten minutes when she saw the cover of a Jane’s Addiction album (and read the lyrics to “Whores”), my parents had no problem with most current popular culture.
Buy Jane’s Addiction – Nothing’s Shocking CDThe Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a podcast that dives deep into one aspect of evangelical culture that did topple over into my family, the Church of Christ, and pretty much all American culture at the time – the Satanic Panic. Because my parents let me listen to rock and roll music and watch all sorts of movies (not everything, mind you, but way more than your typical evangelical kid) and read more or less anything I wanted, we weren’t immediately sucked into the panic. In fact, we kept a pretty skeptical eye towards the movement.
But it did fascinate. I remember watching the notorious Geraldo Rivera special on devil worship, and other pseudo-documentaries on our local UHF station. My brother had some friends whose parents were playing with a Ouiji board one night, and they swore it started moving on its own at some point (never mind they readily admitted they were pretty drunk that night, and possibly high – it definitely happened!) There was a nearby abandoned house that everybody swore was a witch’s coven. My brother snuck in one day and found a lot of candles, pentagrams, and other occult graffiti (and beer cans, pornography, and cigarette butts – definitely signs of devil worship and not teenagers screwing around).
I was always skeptical of such things. I’ve always been logical, even as a youngster, but I was steeped in religion, and I thought maybe, just maybe, some of it was true. Probably not my brother’s friends or that old house, but somewhere, someone was probably worshiping the devil.
It was only years later that I first heard the phrase “satanic panic,” and realized how big a phenomenon it was. The podcast digs into its origins and follows it through its myriad of incarnations all the way until the mid-1990s, where it just kind of fizzled out. It wanders through a wide range of areas, including the Jonestown Massacre, the Charles Manson family, the West Memphis Three, Mike Warnke, a Christian comic who claimed to have been a satanic priest, the McMartin Preschool trial where half a dozen teachers were accused of sexual abuse of numerous children through satanic rituals, and so much more.
The podcast is produced by Christianity Today and written/hosted by a man of faith, so they take the existence of Satan as a reality, but it is quite journalistic in its approach and well worth the listen.
Whistable Pearl
My wife and I are big fans of cozy British mysteries. We found this one on the Acorn streaming service and gave it a go because we’d just watched Kerry Godliman on Taskmaster and enjoyed her bits a lot. She plays Pearl Nolan, a single mom who runs a seafood restaurant in the picturesque seaside town of Whistable. She’s recently started a side gig as a private detective. Naturally, there are a whole lot of murders in this small town. She’s often aided by Mike McGuire, a police detective who has just moved to town from London.
Buy Whitstable Pearl DVDIt doesn’t do anything new with the genre, and honestly, I’d probably stopped watching it a while ago if it weren’t do to Godliman, but she’s so charming I keep coming back.
Brian Wilson (1942-2025)
Buy I Am Brian Wilson: The Genius behind the Beach Boys PaperbackBrian Wilson, the co-founder and poetic genius behind the Beach Boys, has died at the age of 82. To tell the truth, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Beach Boys, while also recognizing their pop harmonies were sublime. Just listen to “Sloop John B? and tell me you aren’t moved.
