Appendix N

2024-05-23T00:00:00.000Z

All this stuff was either foundational to my interest in the hobby, or it's something that gets my imagination going. It's stuff that I love, and with any luck this list will keep growing.

Books/Short Stories:

*The Art of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game *(Weis, 1985)
The Slithering Shadow (Howard, 1933)
The Tower of the Elephant (Howard, 1933)
Rogues in the House (Howard, 1934)
At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft, 1936)
Red Nails (Howard, 1936)
The Hobbit (Tolkien, 1937)
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954)
Dune (Herbert, 1965)
Blood Meridian (McCarthy, 1985)
House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000)
Southern Reach Trilogy (VanderMeer, 2014)
The Fungus (Knight, 1985) (objectively, this one is pretty bad)
*Berserk *(Miura, 1989)

Movies/Shows:

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958)
Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961)
Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962)
Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)
Lord of the Flies (Brook, 1963)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
The Hourglass Sanitorium (Has, 1973)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)
Phantasm (Coscarelli, 1978)
Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)
Dragonslayer (Robbins, 1981)
Heavy Metal (Potterton, 1981)
The Keep (Mann, 1983)
Conan the Destroyer (Fleischer, 1984)
The Black Cauldron (Rich, Berman, 1985)
The Goonies (Donner, 1985)
Red Sonja (Fleischer, 1985)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter, 1986)
Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
Willow (Howard, 1988)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Captain Ron (Eberhardt, 1992)
Cabin Boy (Resnick, 1994)
The Descent (Marshall, 2005)
Old Joy (Reichardt, 2007)
House of the Devil (West, 2009)
Valhalla Rising (Refn, 2010)
A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013)
As Above, So Below (Dowdle, 2014)
The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2015)
Don't Breathe (Álvarez, 2016)
The Void (Gillespie, Kostanski, 2017)
Annihilation (Garland, 2018)
The Terror (Multiple, 2018)
Us (Peele, 2019)
Green Knight (Lowery, 2021)
Barbarian (Cregger, 2022)
The Northman (Eggers, 2022)
Scavengers Reign (Bennett, Huettner, 2023)
Delicious in Dungeon (Miyajima, 2024)
*The Company of Wolves *(Jordan, 1984)
Berserk (Takahashi, 1997)

Games:

Zork Trilogy (Infocom, 1980-82)
Beyond Zork (Infocom, 1987) I learned to read to play Infocom games.
Enchanter Trilogy (Infocom, 1983-85)
Wishbringer (Infocom, 1985)
The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987)
Quake (id Software, 1996)
Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996)
Everquest (Verant Interactive, 1999)
Silent Hill (Konami, 1999)

Berserk?!

2026-02-27T01:53:23.000Z

Light fanboyism to follow, and potential spoilers for the first 34 (or more) volumes of Berserk published by Dark Horse.

As a man of a certain age, I always thought my friends and I had been on the vanguard of late-'90s Geek Culture. "We were into it before it was cool." "We paved the way for you youngins." Blah blah blah. But I hadn't even heard of "Berserk" until this video popped into my YouTube algorithm a couple years back.

Even then I was slow on the uptake. When I finally noticed that the music in the video was from a series [[footnote: It's ridiculous how many times I revisited this video specifically for the music before I even thought to check its source.]], and that the series was supposed to be pretty good, I was in. Hirasawa's music. The ending. GRIFFITH!! Holy shit. A lot of the dialog is classic hyper-literal anime word salad, but that just adds to the charm.

I tore through the anime, and by happenstance the manga was recommended to me after I went apeshit over "Uzumaki," so I already had it in my treasure hoard. Thank god.

Now I can't stop. In fact, in the short time since I wrote the initial excerpt for this post I've read another 10 volumes. The way its developed has been really fun.

I was into the epic scale pseudo-medieval European vibe, and liked the riff on the Inquisition. I was pretty stoked about the transition to a full adventuring party, since the Man Without a Name trope was threatening to overstay its welcome. Adding sorcery and trolls was a neat twist, but is it seriously going full-on trad fantasy now?! Giants and dragons and goblins and moldering skeletons in misty graveyards are pretty fantastical. It'd be a massive change after thousands of gnarly images of phallic/yonic (often at the same time!) demons, but I'm here for it. Spoilers for the rest of the series: Oh okay, fantastical genital monsters and full-on toothy cock demons. Well-played, Miura.

Speaking of massive changes, I'm thrilled Miura eased off the gratuitous sexual violence. I don't assume he meant to glorify sexual assault, but the full-page hero shots of r*pe were gross. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but it was gross. It's still not perfect, but come to think of it, Edgelord Miura more or less vanished after the Conviction arc [[footnote: This actually parallels the story development, with Guts settling into a new found family, etc., so maybe it's a creative decision.]]. Whether or not that lasts, it's been nice.

I'll wrap this up. This post was just an excuse to gush a bit. I was sad to learn that Miura passed a few years back, before finishing this series. But then, an author living long enough to conclude their fantasy epic isn't very fashionable these days.

Not to suggest I'm some sort of immortal demon who sacrificed the lives of his friends to achieve his outsized ambitions..!

The Grumbling Griffin

Appendix N

Books/Short Stories:

Movies/Shows:

Games:

Berserk?!