My Favorite Things with Merrin

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Speculative Chic contributor Merrin, who you may also know as our fearless book club leader!

What does Merrin love when she’s not scouring the internet for books to read? Spoiler alert: text-based games with lots of twists and turns, hilarious D&D podcasts, meeting her heroes, and a television adaptation that actually lives up to the source material. Interested? Read on to learn more!

A Dark Room/The Ensign: I’m a huge fan of cell phone games. My standbys are your classics like solitaire and Tetris. I’ve branched out into ones like Candy Crush and Merge Dragons (my current obsession) but I’m generally leery of anything that encourages micro transactions. My best friend has a lot of the same interests that I do (which is what generally makes her my best friend), and a couple of years ago she suggested a text-based game called A Dark Room.

A Dark Room began its life as a desktop browser game, and you can still play it on the internet for free. The premise of the game is a supply chain survival story in a post-apocalyptic world. You have villagers completing tasks for you while you go out and explore the world. You have random encounters with aliens, humans, and feral animals as you traverse the wilderness. You pick through ravaged cities for copies of books that give hints as to what happened. All the while you have to make sure that you’ve got enough water and food to get home, and that the fire in your room doesn’t go out.

There are some twists and turns to it, things that genuinely surprised me as I played, but I wouldn’t want to spoil that by telling you about them here. The cell phone game is $1.99. There’s also a sequel/prequel — telling you which one is a spoiler — called The Ensign. It’s also $1.99, but does not have a free online version.

Not Another D&D Podcast: I’ve talked before about how much I love Dungeons & Dragons, and very recently it’s progressed to a point that I play a character on a D&D play podcast called Mirth & Misadventure, which is not what I’m going to pitch to you here. My podcast is one of many really good play podcasts out there, and one that I’ve enjoyed almost since its inception is called Not Another D&D Podcast.

This podcast differentiates itself from the other D&D podcasts by following around three pretty ordinary regular folks in the world AFTER a big battle where three heroes saved the world. The tagline they use is “the campaign after the campaign.” Of course, not everything about the heroes who saved the world was as it seemed, and these three ordinary folks have to set about fixing things.

They’re all in the CollegeHumor network, and the podcast is so hilarious that I cry laughing at times. They’ve subverted what you’ve come to expect from the world of D&D for their own purposes. The elf is a “crick” elf who has a companion possum she calls Paw Paw. The paladin in their group is a “green teen,” like a Boy Scout, rising in the ranks in service to Pellor. The human fighter was raised in a dwarfanage (an orphanage for dwarves) and is only attracted to women with beards. It’s AMAZING.

John Scalzi and V.E. Schwab at the Texas Book Festival: Every year, Austin hosts the Texas Book Festival, which is a two day event where they bring in authors told hold panels and talk about their work or relevant topics or, in the case of cookbooks, do cooking demonstrations. (The samples in that tent were delicious.)

This past October, one of my favorite authors in this world was scheduled to present with another author that I love a whole lot, so naturally I had to go and listen to their panel. They talked a lot about the necessity of science fiction, the future of the genre, their own writing habits, a little bit of everything. Afterwards, they had a book signing.

Now, I’m one of those that pre-orders every single book John Scalzi has written from the local bookstore in his hometown, because he goes in and signs all of them. Just because I’m like this, I’ll ask him to draw a self portrait in the book, so I’ve got a pretty fun collection of books by him with a nerdy little drawing with big glasses. The last time I preordered, they refused to ask him to draw a self portrait because, and I quote, “he doesn’t do that.” So I reached out to him on twitter, and he asked where I was, and then he said “bring it to the Texas Book Festival,” which is how I found out he was going to be there at all.

So I’m the girl who showed up to his book signing with about four books that needed self portraits, and he did them all and was super gracious about it, and then stood up for a picture with me.

V.E. Schwab was the other author on his panel and I haven’t actually read anything by her, but I loved her so much in the panel that I also bought her latest book at the festival and she agreed to draw her self portrait in it.

I love when meeting your heroes goes really well.

A Discovery of Witches, the TV show: I was super-excited when I heard they were making a TV show of A Discovery of Witches. When I heard they’d cast Matthew Goode as Matthew Clairmont, the vampire, I was over the moon. I loved the books a lot and while I have plenty of skepticism attached to adaptations of beloved books, by the time I discovered that this was even a thing I’d already heard that it was actually pretty good.

And honestly, it was, for the most part. Without the benefit of internal monologue, the romance does progress rather quickly, but since I love that romance, I really didn’t mind. The gay aunts were the best, and really well cast.

My one annoyance is the distribution. It’s a British television show, but instead of coming to BBC America, which I do have, they only released the show on Sky One, which I do not, and on Shudder, a horror streaming service which I definitely don’t have. Thankfully, a friend let me borrow their login, but either way, it was kind of annoying to get my hands on at first. Thankfully, it has since been released on AMC and BBC America. And! It’s been renewed for a second and third season, which is incredibly exciting.

Merrin has enough feelings about things to literally choke elephants, though why you would want to, she’ll never know. She has been known to argue passionately and loudly in public spaces on whether or not there were elves at Helm’s Deep in the books (there weren’t) and whether or not sleeping counts as time travel (it doesn’t). Her other life’s passions include watching a lot of hockey (an oddity here in Texas) and abusing parenthetical asides (she likes to think of it as the narrator voice breaking into reality). She funds her costly obsessions by working at a non-profit in Austin.

Likes: thigh holsters, flak vests, movies and tv shows that depict space accurately, elves, magic.

Dislikes: The Big Bang Theory (don’t get her started), R-rated violence, the end of Mass Effect 3.

You can also find her on twitter and Goodreads.

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