C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 2

Call of Cthulhu: Down in the Underground

When last we saw our heroes, they were returning from a side trip to Memphis. In our absence, Teddy, Freddy, Evelyn and Calliope had a side adventure and then went out and got properly smashed at a drag king club, the name of which is escaping me, somewhere in Cairo. This all went as well as you could possibly imagine, and they returned incredibly hung over.

Teddy and Dr Willie Preston met for the first time. It was most excellent. Tragically, they then parted ways, Teddy to nurse a headache and...

Recent Reads: Bitterburn

Recent Reads: Bitterburn by Ann Aguirre – I loved this, too.

BITTERBURN is another Beauty and the Beast retelling, and look if I can find one more to read* in the next week or so I’ll be feeling a trifecta of joy over BatB stories. :D

This one’s purely fantasy, not modern at all, and has multiple twists I ADORED, not the least of which is that our Beauty takes herself to the Beast under her own volition, which is always a thing I like to see in BatB stories. I don’t want to spoil anything, but t...

Art Blog: 100 hours setup

I’m having a stupidly good time doing this art class thing, probably because I haven’t started doing anything boring yet. I am, however, FULLY MAKING IT HARDER FOR MYSELF because, to paraphrase Bette Davis, “The hard way is the only way to do it.”

So I did the opening challenge to draw a book on a table, a coffee cup, a doughnut & a house (using no references), and for some fricking reason I did 3/4ths of it as a frickin’ still life…

…followed by drawing my house. Or part of my house. I clearly...

Picoreview: F1

Picoreview: F1 – unexpectedly good, but also hoo boy.

I’d been wibbling about going to see F1, because Brad Pitt is Problematic and I’m not much of a car race fan, but also…I like movies, and it looked like it might be decent. Somebody whose film opinions I frequently agree with saw it and said it was, in fact, a terrific underdog story (a thing I’m a sucker for), but also that Pitt was “uncannily flat” in it. So I became kind of more interested in seeing it, because it took me half a decade or ...

it was HOT

I went and jumped in the sea this weekend, it was that hot.

…the sea, for the record, was VERY COLD and I wish I’d brought goggles, a thing I purely didn’t think of when I went to jump in. As it turns out, I also wish I’d brought ear plugs, because the water in my ears HURT and IDK if that’s because it was so cold or if my ears have become unreasonably sensitive, the latter of which will displease me considerably, but can be dealt with if I actually start swimming again, like, ever.

But! in a go...

Picoreview: Brave New World

Picoreview: Brave New World: This is the weakest of the Cap films, but it’s still in the top third of the MCU, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe the top ten, but I haven’t stepped back to do a top ten list lately. But I thought it was solid and sort of uncannily timely.

Prior to its release (possibly in the relatively early stages of production) I’d heard that it was going to be “Sam’s journey toward earning the shield” which would have been FINE if they hadn’t JUST DONE THAT in Falcon & Winter Sol...

Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder

Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder by Lilith Saintcrow – I loved this.

ROSE & THUNDER is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and look, I’ll be honest, you have to really fuck it up for me to not like a BatB retelling. Lili is not an author prone to fucking things up, and she loves BatB as much as I do, so… yeah, I loved this.

The setting is more or less the real world. It was published in 2015 and sort of feels like it’s set around 2005, but it’s basically urban fantasy; the world as we know i...

Release Day: Renaissance Bear

If you’re just here for the links, RENAISSANCE BEAR, the third book in the Renaissance Shifter series, is now available at Amazon!

There was an unavoidable delay with the print edition, which will be out in a couple of weeks. Sorry about that!

AAAAAAH I love these covers/this series so much I’m having so much fun with it breaaaaaathes okay here you go:

Grizzly shifter Jon Torben is planning a summer of sword-fighting and beer-drinking at his home town’s annual Renaissance Faire…up until the mom...

Picoreview: Falcon & Winter Soldier

Picoreview: Falcon & Winter Soldier: I liked this show a lot the first time I watched it, and I think I like it more the second time. The storyline I’m more invested in is Bucky’s, because I am a SUCKER for a good redemption story, but Sam’s arc is a really good one, and the eventual payoff of the title changing to Captain America and the Winter Soldier was emotionally really satisfying.

I now recall how much I despised the extreme closeups on Bucky & the shrink in his sessions in the first epis...

Call of Cthulhu: Pour One Out For Dillon

I was sick the last two gaming sessions, and in my absence, Our Heroes gathered a lot of information, and…lost a hero.

Dillon, who if you will recall from the end of the England adventure, came away with compromised lungs, was caught in a cloud of icy lung-sucking horribleness, which worked as advertised, and killed him dead.

Of the various players and DM, it appears that Ted (Dillon’s actual player) was the only person even KIND of emotionally prepared for this possibility, and even he was a li...