My Favorite Things This Week #100

The Friday High 5: It's All the Fanfare's Second Birthday!

Dec 13, 2024

All the Fanfare turned 2 last week.

I originally started the newsletter because I was frustrated with how little reach I had on certain platforms despite having tens of thousands of followers. Feeling a bit disgruntled, I came to Substack with a list of 37 email addresses. As of today, 765 people have signed up. That boggles my mind. I don’t exactly cover pop culture from the usual perspective.

They say to write to discover what you think. It turns out I think about the craziest things.

In anticipation of the occasion, I’ve been redesigning the website. There are a few niggling things to fix but it’s close enough to share more broadly. I wanted a site that reflected my general philosophy that most things are funny when you think about it. The redesign has a certain whimsy I dig.

Part of the redesign includes rethinking my approach.

All articles on All the Fanfare are now exclusive to paid supporters for reasons both financial and philosophical.

The website is hosted on the ghost platform. They charge per member, and given the vast majority of my members are on free accounts, it's not the best arrangement. Pivoting to using the website only for supporters means I can treat it more like a roped-off VIP area. And it's frankly a lot cleaner to know everything there is exclusive to paid supporters.

The newsletter portion hosted on Substack will remain predominantly free content, as is done today: High 5s, Sunday Funnies, random reviews, and quick takes.

Why am I using 2 platforms?

Substack’s recommendation and growth features are second to none.
Substack’s site design and customization features are mediocre.

Ideally I’d just be using one platform but that’s not in the cards right now.

Anyway, I said something in the subtitle about gifts.

Gift #1

A couple of years ago I started writing mini-reviews of all the bad but enjoyable Christmas movies I was watching. That tradition has continued; the list is up to 40 movies. I’m updating it almost daily right now.

I’ve brought the post out from behind the paywall to help you identify the keepers from stinkers: The Best and Worst Christmas Movies to Stream This Year

Gift #2

New members can get their first month for only $1!

Though I publish a lot of free material to the newsletter, my best stuff goes exclusively to the website. It’s the most researched and thought out. It’s also where my truly personal work is. If you enjoy the newsletter, the essays are that times like, a million.

Here’s an assortment of notable posts:

I publish 3-4 new exclusives every month. I’m currently working on:

The Vince Vaughn Christmas Experience
Why I Am the Way I Am: 80s Sex Comedies and Me
How G.I. Joe Reflects America’s Past and Cobra Foretells its Future

The $1 subscription offer expires December 27th!

Gift #3

If you fill out this brief reader survey, I’ll give you 1 month of exclusive access.

If you take advantage of gift #2, you get 4 months for $1.

But wait! There’s more!

If you sign-up for an annual membership and fill out the survey, I will give you a second year for free. That’s 24 months for $30, which works out to $1.25 a month.

I don’t run sales on subscriptions because I price them as low as I feel comfortable doing ($3 month/$30 a year). This is the best price you will ever see on my stuff.

I’ll send you an email confirming when your access is active, and an updated end date if it’s tacked onto a paid subscription.

This offer also expires December 27th!

Onto Year 3!

All the Fanfare has gotten through its crawling and teething phases. It’s mostly potty-trained and only sometimes wipes poop on the walls. I’m looking forward to watching it grow, and everything year 3 has in store.

Thanks for being here and for reading. I appreciate every single one of you.

This Week’s High 5

Every Friday I share 5 things I liked this week, in case you’re in the market for enjoyable experiences. Going to be a bit of a speed round this week given I just spent several minutes congratulating myself for being oblivious to the whims of the marketplace.

Nutcrackers

Ben Stiller headlines this bizarre yet charming holiday film on Hulu. He plays a Chicago real estate developer, which falls below New York stock broker and Silicon Valley tech executive on the yuppie scale. Despicable, but make it Midwestern.

Here’s how far he has his head up his own butt: His sister and brother-in-law die, leaving behind 4 young sons, and his chief concern is finding someone to take them off his hands. To the point of approaching random rich dudes at supermarkets.

Fortunately, Linda Cardellini is there to straighten him out. I enjoyed this movie, but it’s crazy that in the year of our Lord 2024, there are still films in which the most notable female is there solely to point out what an idiot the main character is.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

The game starts with you playing through the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And incredibly it gets better from there. Like all good Indiana Jones, the story involves quasi-religious artifacts and woo-woo mysticism, and our intrepid hero, stuck in the middle. Is he a scholar, a vigilante, or something else altogether?

It’s still early going but this is everything I’ve ever wanted in a tomb raiding video game. Exploration. Fights. History. Intrigue. You know how punches in Indiana Jones land with a satisfying and explosive crack? This game has that and it never gets old.

I never really got into the Uncharted or Tomb Raider games. Turns out what I was missing was the opportunity to cosplay as Harrison Ford cosplaying as a Vatican priest.

Game Changers

This new HBO documentary series delves into the origin stories of the most well-known gaming companies: Nintendo, Sega, Atari, etc. It’s a nice blend of archival footage and present day interviews with the principal characters, now 20-30 years later. It checks all of my boxes. My only complaint: not a huge fan of the narrator. He sounds like he should be doing voiceover for Nickelodeon. His zany youthfulness just does not land. Could we not get the Hard Knocks guy for this?

The MCU, Circa 1987

I don’t know how or why YouTube served this up, but I’m glad it did.

Friends, this is full-on cheese. But some cheese is tasty. Like liquid gold Velveeta? I’m pretty sure the ingredients are 99% lab-made synthetics and 1% cheese, but man, that 1% goes so hard. Just like this 27-year-old Macy’s Day float.

The fights make the 1960s Batman TV series look like high art, but what’s really bizarre is the Back to the Future soundtrack. If you want to truly appreciate how awesome peak MCU is, consider that at one point this was our live action Marvel and we loved it.

Lunchtime D&D

I’ve mentioned it in this space a couple of times, but I run a bi-weekly Dungeons & Dragons game over lunch. The game is old-school in its approach, a literal dungeon delve in which the whole point is to explore a mega-dungeon and find what treasures there lie.

There are various factions vying for control of the dungeon, and also a custodial staff of Kobolds (small lizard men) who operate a small chunk of fantasy Switzerland within the dungeon. Picture Mos Eisley run by Oompa Loompas. Weapons are checked at the gate and hostilities strictly forbidden.

A few sessions back, a group of orcs mixed it up with some of my players just inside the border. In the end, the orcs were dead and the offending player characters were considered fugitives. The party’s wizard negotiated with the head Kobold and plead down the charges. The chief antagonist—a thief named Brisco—was jailed for 4 hours and the matter considered resolved.

Only I decided to have a little fun.

The head Kobold commissioned dozens of paintings in which Brisco was placed in humiliating positions. The Kobold whipping him. The Kobold riding his back. Brisco feeding the Kobold grapes. Hilarious, which was the only point. But the one-off joke is now threatening to become a game in itself.

This week, the party needed a favor from the head Kobold. The wizard offered what the Kobold most desired: The thief in jail again, and time for more humiliating portraits. Only we discovered Brisco’s celebrity had taken on a life of its own, and he’d become something of a folk hero. I say “we discovered” because it was news to me. It just happened in the course of play, which is the true magic of D&D.

So now the players are talking about backing the head Kobold’s chief rival and ruling fantasy Switzerland via proxy, a most unexpected development but one I greet with open arms.

That’s it for this hybrid High 5 / anniversary post! If you discovered something cool this week, brighten my life by telling me about it in the comments.

And don’t forget to take advantage of the limited-timed gifts!