Batt Scare-It’s Mutant Menagerie

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Matt Ferrett

I started making spooky trap beats and some other simple stuff in BandLab. The app has some really cool looper packs that I’ve been playing around with. I’m just barely dipping my toe into actually writing melodies for virtual instruments, but after years of being intimidated by music it’s really exciting to finally tear some ideas out of my head and make them into something (mostly) listenable. Take a listen!

MONSTROMETRY

John Carpenter, eat your heart out. WAIT JOHN NOT LITERALLY! OH NO! NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

EXTREME G

In the future, no one can drive 55.

RAT NIGHT

In Japan it’s called Giant Horde Beast Nezura.

It’s not all spooky beats and satanic techno though! I was able to cook up some metal and even a little blues!

DRIVE HOME AFTER DARK

The polar opposite of Extreme G. Just ridin’ home.

If you like those, be sure to check out the whole menagerie!

Save Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum!

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Matt Ferrett

Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum is an insanely cool collection of vintage and antique animatronics, pinball machines, arcade cabinets, penny-arcades, nickelodeons, and a million other creepy-cool-crazy old coin-op contraptions from yesteryear. It’s a one-of-a-kind exhibit and I love that it’s right here in Michigan. Here are a couple local news stories that sum up this delightful slice of mechanized whimsy and automated buffoonery:

If that sounds cool to you, please consider signing the petition on change.org. As a fellow believer in the positive power of silliness, I’ll end with a quote from the late founder of the Marvelous Mechanical Museum:

“Wouldn’t the world be better off if we took nonsense more seriously?”
Marvin Yagoda

OOZEPUNK

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Matt Ferrett

WHAT IS OOZEPUNK?

Oozepunk is the term I’m coining for the microgenre of urban heroic sci-fi horror-fantasy that first exploded in the mid-80s with movies, shows, and comics like Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Toxic Avenger, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Hellboy, Street Sharks, and others. Lots of natural crossover with Biopunk and Cyberpunk, aesthetically and philosophically.

*Your childhood trauma didn’t let you forget Roger Rabbit heavily featured colorful nightmare slime, did it?*

Continue reading →

Mario Kart 8 – Booster Course Pack Wave 6 Speculation/Obsessing

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Matt Ferrett

Work was slow today so naturally my mind drifted to Mario Kart. I’ve always loved the Mario Kart games, but for my money Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the new gold standard for the entire kart-racing genre. It just FEELS SO GOOD to drive these goofy little contraptions around and blow up your friends in psychedelic cartoon worlds.

Booster Course Pack Wave 5 just dropped this week and I’m loving this shit. Squeaky Clean Sprint?! KAMEK?!

This unholy union?!

Of course as awesome as this stuff is, I can’t help but think about that one last wave of goodies we’re getting at the end of the year. At the very least we know we’re getting two new drivers and 8 new-old courses (with 1 or 2 possibly being brand new), but at this point Nintendo hasn’t announced any specifics.

It’s fun to guess and speculate though! Since we’re only guaranteed 2 new drivers (and there’s a smaller pool to pull from), I started there.

Continue reading →

“Separating the Art from the Ectoplasm”

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Matt Ferrett

The Ghostbusters are called in to deal with one of the most famous and thematically-appropriate ghosts: the restless spirit of the massively influential innovator of literary horror, H.P. Lovecraft.

EXT. THE QUAD, MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY – NIGHT

The gaseous, glowing ghost of H.P. LOVECRAFT looms over all four Ghostbusters, stretching and twisting to impossible proportions, tentacles and antennae slithering out of him like growing shadows. A dry, howling, unnatural wind swirls through the Quad.

LOVECRAFT
CHATTERING INTERBREEDERS! FOUL, GUFFAWING APES! I WILL CLEANSE–

VENKMAN
Yeesh, who knew Poe was such a dick?

Continue reading →

Ghostbusters: Franchise Rights

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Matt Ferrett

This is a weird stream of consciousness thing that is both me critically reflecting on Ghostbusters in 2023, and also sort of reinventing it with a proposed infomercial. Why this all rushed into my head this afternoon I’ll never know.

“Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters” is a catchy lyric and a fun in-universe slogan for the freelance ghost catchers, but it’s also a truncated set-up and punchline. “Uh oh I have [crazy problem x]! I know, I’ll call [crazy problem x]busters!” It’s a goof on what crazy times we live in, and how New York City really is the city that has EVERYTHING. As time goes on, the problems of the world get stranger and more unpredictable–new problems mean new solutions that can be sold for a premium… enter the Ghostbusters.

I started playing around with the set-up and punchline of Ghostbusters. Movies and TV shows about exorcisms and spiritual combat with the supernatural have been consistently HOT for the last 10 or 15 years. The Conjuring and Insidious movie series both come to mind. Even still, nobody else besides the Ghostbusters are out there doing Secular Humanist ghost removal. What if you’re not Catholic? What if it turns out that there aren’t as many rabbis trained to fight dybbuks as the movies would have you think? What if an exorcism is just too damned expensive?

Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!

Continue reading →

D&D Cheat Sheet

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Matt Ferrett

One of the things I did to prepare for the Seaward! campaign was whip up a quick Dungeons & Dragons reference guide for my mostly-new players.

The cheat sheet summarizes the core mechanics of D&D, runs through a basic Turn in Combat, describes the Actions available during a typical Combat Turn, and slams through a quick glossary of D&D’s most-used terms and abbreviations. If that sounds like something you might want to bring to your table (or if you’d like a little more insight into my DM style), keep reading!

Continue reading →

I did it all for Tanuki!

Posted on November 30, 2021 by Matt Ferrett

Dungeons & Dragons has a terrific variety of creatures for players to use when creating their next great adventurer. Even classic fantasy beings like humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings can be tweaked with variant options or distinctive subclasses, and there are plenty of oddball options for players too! Cat-people, magic robots, centaurs, fairies, shapeshifters, bird-people, devil-people–there’s something for just about everybody, and it’s a list that keeps expanding! (I’m super psyched for the Owlin coming up in Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos). But there’s one roly-poly folklore trickster spirit that I think would make a terrific player character: TANUKI!

Yeah, my obsession with Japanese monsters absolutely does not end with the gigantic radioactive kind! Tanuki are yokai, and yokai are a “class of supernatural entities and spirits in Japanese folklore.” Yokai include a vast array of ghosts, monsters, demons, spirits, goblins, demoted gods, and people, animals and even inanimate objects transformed by magic, long life or other strange, unknowable forces. There are HUNDREDS of different Yokai, and they range from terrifying, paranormal killing machines to harmless goofball pranksters. Yokai don’t fit neatly into a single category of ghoul or ghost, but I think it’d be pretty fitting to think of them as equivalent to The Fey. The Fey which includes nice-guy Disney fairies like Tinkerbell… but also includes baby-stealing gremlins, undead curse-mongers, tricksters that spoil milk while you sleep, and all kinds of unknowable freakazoids. Tanuki tend to land on the “oafish jokester” end of the yokai spectrum… but if you push these jolly goofers too far they’ll retaliate spectacularly! Sounds like a kick-ass Bard to me! Keep reading to see how I’d use D&D’s existing rules to “homebrew” a playable Tanuki, complete with a Level 1 character sheet!

Continue reading →

Seaward!

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Matt Ferrett

Hey look! It’s my first non-kaiju post!

First things first! If Jess, Rachel, Julie, Megan, or Shawn are reading this, STOP. Please?! C’mon, be cool!

OKAY GOOD (I hope). I don’t think they read this or even know it exists, but ya never know! Seaward is my first on-going, homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign! I’ve written and run a couple one-shots and even ran several sessions of a campaign I was writing, but that sputtered out. A lot of D&D does, in my experience!

Seaward is an adventure designed for players with little-to-no D&D experience, but it’s also intended to be engaging and exciting for more experienced players too. This first post will be a sort of “Session Zero”: an origin story for this campaign, a brief look at my own D&D experience, a rundown of the choices I made and why, plus a slate of cool pre-generated player characters! If that sounds cool to you, and again, you aren’t Julie, Shawn, Megan, Rachel, or Jess, read on, brave adventurer!

Continue reading →

MONSTERS HAVE CONQUERED THE WORLD

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Matt Ferrett

[Like I mentioned in my previous post, here’s my incomplete Godzilla vs Kong review! The further along it gets, the more unfinished it is, but I wanted to share what I had before signing off. After the review I’ll cap it off with a mess of closing thoughts. Enjoy!]

Godzilla vs. Kong is the movie I have been waiting for since I was a little boy. Not necessarily this version of the movie, but a big budget, high-profile rematch between my two favorite monsters of all time. I love these two big mean fuckers on their own, but together? That’s pure movie magic. Totally audacious, unhinged imagination let loose and exploding on screens all over the planet.

The more I learned about filmmaking and the more I paid attention to the film industry growing up, the more I came to believe that Godzilla and King Kong would never meet again on the big screen. Even when Legendary announced their plans to build towards this movie, I had my doubts. A single MonsterVerse flop could easily kill the plan, a global plague could even more easily kill the plan. And yet!! And yet here I am, reviewing the movie I’ve hoped for and daydreamed for my whole life and spent over half my life convinced I would never get to see. Not only that, but the rest of the world at large (not just the kaiju fan community!) seems genuinely stoked! True randos were cooking up funny tweets and fan art and speculating about plot details in the lead-up to its release! I told a friend that the release of Godzilla vs. Kong felt like Monster Christmas, he agreed!

Godzilla vs. Kong, currently the capstone on Legendary Pictures’ ambitious MonsterVerse cinematic universe, has its problems, large and small… but it also delivers all the big, crazy, colorful, joyful, thrilling, scary, gross, and awe-inspiring fun you could ask for in the greatest monster prize fight rematch in history. Just the fact that there’s now a mega-budget, (relative) smash-hit Hollywood blockbuster that has a title starting with “Godzilla vs.” is incredibly exciting. The fact that said title ends with “Kong”?! I’m freaking the fuck out over here, gang. I will be for a long time 🤣

This won’t be one of my usual reviews. Partly because I’m probably incapable of being objective about this movie (I have pretty bad recency bias on a good day, let alone for a movie I’ve daydreamed about since I was 6), but also because I want to talk about where I’ve been lately, the new kaiju boom we’re living in, and how I’m thinking about some major changes when it comes to my writing and this website. I’ve also been jonesing for an excuse to look back on what this site, the kaiju fandom, and the monsters themselves have really meant to me all this time–MONSTERS CONQUER THE WORLD was always a deeply personal project, and these last couple years especially have taught me a lot about myself and why these big stompy bastards matter so much to me.

So this might be a sort-of kind-of a farewell post? Or at least saying farewell to the super in-depth kaiju reviews? Who knows, I might feel completely differently in the near future and find myself re-inspired to get back to the big meaty reviews! I’m not in a position to guarantee anything right now–so instead I want to just go with the flow and see where it takes me. Deep down I’ve been itching to pivot away from writing about other peoples’ creations and start writing my own stuff (I’ve threatened friends and family with fan-fic for years), and that’s at least some part of why I’ve had such a hard time getting out reviews the last couple years. Of course I can’t just WALK AWAY when there’s so much kaiju kontent to review, so for this big funky mega-post I will also do micro-reviews of every “Main Monster’s” filmography. For me that means Godzilla, Kong, Gamera, and Ultraman, and probably a few other odds and ends in there too [Had to ditch this, sorry. Maybe someday!]. This is a weird one and a big one and a personal one, so hoist up your glowing nuke-ax, buckle into your H.E.A.V. and grab a barf bag because we’re atomic breath-ing all the way down to the Hollow fuckin’ Earth!

Continue reading →