Stranger Things (Netflix, Series 1)

A geeky boy goes missing and a girl with superpowers shows up; moms freak out and the sheriff kicks ass; government conspiracies and aliens monsters, oh my!

My commentary is very spoiler-heavy.

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Overall: When the show opens with a D&D game, do you really think I wouldn’t like it? That was a really fun bit of TV, even if the “children in danger” and child disappearance / death plot points freak me out a little. I’m looking forward to season 2.

Philcon 2016

This con was a bit more for Jethrien than for me, but that’s okay. Philcon tends towards being a “literary” con; there’s relatively little emphasis on comics or anime and they don’t get big media guests. But that worked out fine, and this isn’t our first rodeo, so we knew what we were getting into.

ARR spent the first few hours with his great-aunt (which included bonus visits by his great-grandmother, great-great-aunt, and second cousin), while Jethrien and I both attended panels. I think my personal favorite was the “Made of Balonium” panel, talking about technobabble and made-up science. One panelist brought up the possibility of running an FTL ship off a “kitten drive,” which requires the smallest, cutest child on board to bring a kitten to engineering for sacrifice. The more heart-wrenching the scene, the faster the ship goes. I also ordered a copy of X-Machina based on that panel, as the publisher was on the panel and pimped it.

After Jethrien picked up ARR, I took him to the games room, as he’s been big into trying out new board games lately. Games ARR tried out included (but were not limited to) Get Bit!, IceDice, Quick Cups, Blockus, Sushi Go!, Roll For It!, and Spot It Junior Animals. (We also made a brief attempt at Dungeon Roll, but decided it was too complicated.) He also spent 45 minutes with a wooden hub-and-spoke construction set, building a giant starship engine with a little girl around his age. I don’t feel a desperate need to buy any of these games—none seemed to stand out as a massive success—but they were all amusing.

Then we joined Ivy03 and D for sushi dinner. I played a few more games with ARR, then he watched a few videos and went to bed. I had considered staying up and reading after ARR was asleep, but it turned out an 8pm bedtime was what I needed, too. Jethrien was out late, so the next morning we let her go back to sleep as I took ARR for breakfast and then to play with transformers and dinosaurs in the hotel’s “conversation pit” in the lobby. The games room re-opened at 10am and we returned there for an hour, and Jethrien took over game-playing so I could properly check out the dealer’s room. I bought the four-book set of “Dear Cthulhu” advice columns and a trade paperback about superheroes attempting speed-dating.

We then met my friend and fellow Koleinu alum Rivka for lunch at a glatt kosher pan-Asian place, which worked out very nicely. ARR was very well behaved and very happily tried everything, as this was “a restaurant with no cow milk.” We stopped in to visit Jethrien’s other grandmother on the way home, where ARR was fascinated with a wooden marble-powered machine that apparently had fascinated the previous two generations as well.

And then we went home and fell over, because we were all exhausted.