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RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 5 – House of Fashion, Review & Power Ranking

January 28, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fifth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – House of Fashion. It’s an unconventional material design challenge with a twist: the queens are split into three groups and have to present cohesive runway collections for the House of (Michelle) Visage, the House of (Carson) Kressley, and the House of (Ross) Matthews.

This episode lacked a certain spark, and it’s hard to decide if that was down to the 40-minute runtime or the peculiar version of this familiar challenge. Seasons 3, 4, & 5 each opened with and iconic unconventional materials episode with a full cast of queens.

Season 4’s “RuPocalypse Now!” is probably the best of the bunch – packed with Sharon’s zombie look, Jiggly’s baked potato couture, and LaShawn Beyond’s classic “Post-Apopaloctic” line. It’s a 63-minute edit, but 20 of those minutes are entrances and a length photo shoot challenge! That means the meat of the design challenge (including the whole “wrestling with zombies for clothes” bit) still fit into 40 minutes, and it included both a walkaround with Ru and the private judges deliberations.

Of everything that feels squeezed by these 40-minute edits, I think the element that is most-sorely missing are those private judges deliberations. Without them, we don’t have any sense of RuPaul as a character on her own show. It also complete defangs Michelle Visage if we can’t hear her cutting opinions in private. Finally, it renders the guest judges completely pointless, since we don’t get to hear their unbiased opinions as they go to bat for the queens.

It was especially cruel to miss out on those deliberations in this episode, where Michelle and Ross had queens representing their brands and the guest judge was Janelle Monae, who knows something about fashion!

House of Visage

House of Kressley

House of Matthews

Looking beyond the edit, there was also the unusual nature of this iteration of the unconventional material challenge. First, since the queens were in teams it meant there was no apparent fighting over materials – sharing was in their best interest. Aside from losing the prurient fun of the catty fighting over who gets what leopard-print pillow, what was really lacking was a feeling of scarcity.

Part of what makes unconventional material challenges truly challenging is the queens trying to figure out what they can construct out of things other than fabric. Yet, in this challenge there was enough for nearly every queen to make a cape!

If I had to award a team win, it’d go to the House of Matthews. Even if their collection trended a little bit casual, it was cohesive and there wasn’t a bad look in the bunch. The judges seemed to agree, giving half the group a high placement and calling the other two safe.

What did this unconventional version of the unconventional materials design challenge mean for my power rankings? While the very top remains the same as last week’s Snatch Game ranking, there are some major shake-ups in the middle of the pack as the queens without wins jostle for positive critiques and screen time.

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 5 – House of Fashion, Review & Power Ranking

Breaking News: D&D continues support of Open Gaming License (OGL 1.0), releases their core rules SRD under Creative Commons

January 27, 2023 by krisis

Huge news breaking in the past hour: In a totally shocking reversal, D&D and its parent companies Wizard of the Coast and Hasbro have abandoned plans for a restrictive update to the Open Gaming License (OGL) that would revoke the existing OGL v1.0. Even more shocking, they have released their “System Reference Document” for free under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License!

Image by ScalyDragon from Pixabay

I first wrote about these changes and the depressing effect they have on TTRPG creators and players alike a few weeks ago.

The OGL v1.0 is the license that allows 3rd-Party creators to publish products that use the rules and core concepts of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

Now, D&D has gone beyond re-affirming their support for that license by offering free and irrevocable access to their entire 5th edition core ruleset – called the System Reference Document (SRD) under Creative Commons.

The now freely-available information not only includes rules of play, but standard spells, and classic D&D monster state blocks. You can access the massive 400+ page document here.

This is a massive shift, not only compared to the proposed restrictive OGL v1.2, but compared to what anyone imagined was possible a few months ago.

In the words of D&D executive producer Kyle Brink from his announcement post:

This Creative Commons license makes the content freely available for any use. We don’t control that license and cannot alter or revoke it. It’s open and irrevocable in a way that doesn’t require you to take our word for it. And its openness means there’s no need for a VTT policy. Placing the SRD under a Creative Commons license is a one-way door. There’s no going back.

Our goal here is to deliver on what you wanted.

Of course, many 3rd Party producers have already announced creating their own open gaming platforms, like Paizo and Kobold Press. However, D&D has undercut those plans by making the 5e rules available in Creative Commons in perpetuity. That changes the playing field for smaller creators, who can continue to create content that will sell to 5e fans with total security.

Gizmodo has more context on this breaking news story.

Marvel United: Multiverse has a Civil War in their new expansion box (and uses it to solve their Young Avengers problem)

January 27, 2023 by krisis

Breaking news! Minutes ago, CMON’s Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign announced its third new expansion box and a new stretch goal: Marvel United Multiverse – Civil War!

While Civil War wasn’t on my list of 10 predicted expansion boxes in my last post, I’m still claiming victory. That’s because this box includes Kate Bishop, and if you buy it from Kickstarter it will also include Hulking.

That’s two of the four core Young Avengers down. Plus, the box came just as the Kid Loki stretch goal was met, which introduced a Wiccan stretch goal. That’s two more Young Avengers down, including another of the core four.

We’re now missing just three characters able to play a complete Young Avengers team across any of their incarnations: Stature (Cassie Lang), the final core founding member; Grant Morrison’s creation Marvel Boy (Noh-Varr), from Kieron Gillen’s run; and the depowered mutant Prodigy, also from Gillen’s run.

Given the potential Ant-Man synergy I’d still expect them to fit in Stature before this campaign ends. Marvel Boy and Prodigy are slightly more obscure, so I wouldn’t lay heavy odds on seeing the pair of them.

(Want to play Marvel United right now? Grab either the Marvel United or Marvel United X-Men core boxes right now. They are fun cooperative games that are fun to play with adults and kids alike.)

The Marvel United Multiverse Civil War box does more than just introduce Kate Bishop and Hulking to the game. It re-implements Captain America and Iron Man from the core Marvel United box with beefed up cards. It introduces a MCU-friendly Iron Spider skin for Peter Parker with new cards. Plus, it includes missing 80s Avengers Tigra, Wonder Man, Yellowjacket, Spectrum (Monica Rambeau), and the first giant-size hero sculpt with Bill Foster AKA Goliath!

Civil War also introduces an entirely new mode of play: player-vs-player. [Read more…] about Marvel United: Multiverse has a Civil War in their new expansion box (and uses it to solve their Young Avengers problem)

Updated: Guide to Excalibur

January 27, 2023 by krisis

I’m excited to share this X-Guide update, not only because it contains my favorite comic of all time, but because it’s my first ever “normal” guide update! Updated today, it’s my Guide to Excalibur – including a complete Excalibur Reading Order and links to read every physical and digital collection of Excalibur ever released!

Guide to Excalibur

The Guide to Excalibur was the first 2010s guide that I rebuilt to my new style and standard in 2021, which means this is the first routine maintenance update I’ve done so far this decade.

Over the past year, Excalibur wrapped up its collection of the 2019 Tini Howard & Marcus To run in both trade paperback and oversize hardcover. Howard continued some characters and themes of that title into Knights of X (2022) with artist Bob Quinn, which was just five issues and collected in a single trade paperback.

(Howard is still writing Betsy Braddock, but now she has graduated to her own Captain Britain title!)

When it comes to past Excalibur collections, the two years since my last update brought us two major releases – plus some big news in the last month. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Excalibur

X-Factor Math & Maps: Collected Issue Counting and Future Omnibus Mapping

January 26, 2023 by krisis

A few weeks ago I updated the Guide to X-Factor to present day, which means now it’s time for mathing and mapping X-Factor! How much of X-Factor been collected from its start in February 1986 to the team’s most-recent appearance Dec 2021? How many issues have been collected in color, Epic Collection, or Omnibus formats? And, what’s the perfect X-Factor mapping to collect the remaining issues into an impressive shelf of omnibus volumes

Get ready for the deepest possible dive into the data behind the physical collections of X-Factor!

This is a pilot of a new post format that acts as a companion to major guide updates. It’s a way to bring back my popular series of omnibus-focused posts from 2017, where I looked at dozens of likely entries on Tigereyes’ annual Marvel Omnibus straw poll and then mapped the results.

Those posts were major favorites for many readers, but each one could take as long as a brand new comic guide – and, back in 2017 I still had many guides still to build. Oh, and there was also the brief interruption where I found out we would be moving to New Zealand in the middle of the 50-post series!

To get started with our X-Factor Math & Maps, let’s look at the current collection standings for X-Factor:

Series	Total Issues	in Color*	in Epic	in Oversize
X-Factor	325	282	74	176
as a percentage:		82.46%	22.77%	54.15%

* I am no longer including Essentials in my tally of collected issues now that they are long out of print and Marvel has retired the black-and-white reprint format.

How does that break down across every X-Factor series? What am I even counting? Read on to find out! And, when you’re done, be sure to leave a comment to let me know if you’d like to see more posts like this in the future.