ON MY MIND: Wolverine, GTA 6, AMZIAH KING, The Lucas Museum and DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL

One thing I should be embracing with this newsletter is immediacy.

Yes, I love to write deep-dive pieces and do research and work on giant long-term projects, and that’s not going to change any time soon. I couldn’t even if I tried. It’s how I’m wired. I think part of that is a response to the grind of writing online movie news every day for twenty years. It burned some part of me out completely. But there are plenty of things worth talking about with you that don’t need that kind of in-depth preparation. Sometimes I just want to share some things that are on my mind, things that might not be as interesting in two weeks or six months or whatever. Speed is not my thing as a writer anymore, but it is good to sometimes give yourself a challenge just to see what happens.

I’m starting to catch up with a lot of movies to prepare for the end of the year, and I’ve seen a lot of good stuff lately. I’m also working on a new audio commentary for an upcoming 4K release, recording new episodes of The Hip Pocket, and waiting on a start date on a TV show I’m (maybe?) working on at some point this fall. All of this and I’m also starting to consider something that is a huge personal change if it happens. It feels like a lot to be juggling, and more than ever, art is what keeps me sane.

For example, I’ve spent a lot of this year catching up on the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and if you don’t know what that is, you’re me in January. I had never heard of Matt Dinniman or his massively-successful series of books, and I don’t think that’s unusual anymore. With the death of the monoculture, you can have something that is a massive hit with millions of fans and you can also be completely unknown to an equally large number of people. I think that’s changing for Dinniman. Peacock is currently developing a big-budget streaming adaptation of his series, and this year, I’ve seen more and more references to it in more and more places. I don’t know if that’s just because now I’m paying attention, or because it is genuinely picking up steam, but either way, it’s been a great read that found me at the exact right time.

The series follows the adventures of Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, in the wake of an alien invasion that destroys much of the world. The people who aren’t immediately killed are sent into a multi-level dungeon that is designed as part of an annual game broadcast to the entire universe. People are forced to survive level after level of mayhem, monsters, and murder, with each level designed as a stand-alone experience. Carl and Princess Donut are absurd lead characters at first, and Dinniman loves to pile on the absurdity on top of that, and the first couple of books are pretty much pure comedy. The stakes are real, though. If you’re killed in the game, you’re killed. That’s it. There are NPCs who are part of the dungeon, and the nature of those NPCs is one of the many larger threads that Dinniman’s interested in exploring. This is what they call a LitRPG book series, a kind of fantasy novel that is a hybrid of literature and role playing games, and game mechanics are a HUUUUUUUUGE part of what Dinniman’s doing in the books. Carl and Donut have to think about inventory management and skill trees and leveling up and achievement rewards and all kinds of things that are baked into the language of gaming. I’ve tried reading other LitRPG books, and it doesn’t always work for me. I think it’s a tricky balancing act. Dinniman may be the very best at it that I’ve encountered, and he makes it feel natural, just part of the texture of his world. I haven’t been an active role-playing gamer in years and years, but this brought all of it back to me immediately.