The Thing Giveaway Contest + SOMA Update
Added 2025-04-18 19:02:41 +0000 UTCHey everyone!
So travelling earlier last month I caught a pretty bad sickness that was coming in and out which was mainly stopping me from doing voiceover. That's behind me now which is good since now I can get the damn video done, since just having my voice be out is maybe one of the most frustrating blockers I have for projects (I was still able to do the PST Subspace episode since I'm at least playing a bug man in that). It feels like a few years ago I rarely ever got sick, though apparently back when one of my spine discs popped out a few years back part of the longterm side effects of being on some steroid painkillers for that period of time is that it can change your immunity system in weird ways. It was nice while it lasted!
SOMA was always going to be a trickier video since I was debating whether or not it made sense to skip it and go right back to a much easier to parse out Amnesia Rebirth video, but I realized it's just too important in how some things pass forward into Rebirth, plus it's such a compelling idea. The issue there is it's almost too compelling when it comes to making a video since there are roughly 400 video essays ranging from some great analysis to "imagine if cleaning your room doesn't matter because you woke up as computer" repeated over 2 hours. I never want videos to drag since I always try to edit down if I can help it, and there's always going to be some crossing points with someone else's the more popular the game is. This time around it's trying to keep it concise without bogging it down in too many side tangents, along with looking at where it lies in the strange chain of Frictional and Friends games beyond looking at it entirely in a vacuum. The "voice being out" comes into play there as well, since some things you outline or write down in more detail can be clunky or weird when read aloud, so sometimes things have to be scrapped or redone on the fly. It still amazes me with what look like the easiest sentences can completely ownzone my speech at random.
Also in general I'm going to try and write slightly lengthier updates again when appropriate. Hooded Horse keeps me on my toes with surprises along with general life wrenches (we signed 9 Kings aboard extremely quickly) so what I usually have marked out as free time is more unreliable these days. If the Age of Decadence video also looks like the length is going to get insane I'll probably have a video on something simpler between it and the SOMA one since I'm trying to increase the pace on this end from being "a video a month or so" to the three weekish turnaround I was managing for a period. This will be tricky, but it's also the nature of just having some bigger projects when it comes to them having more intricate stories to get into.
Anyhow I've spent far too long of trying to figure out a giveaway not involving an art contest (not everyone draws even if it wasn't too directly skill based in the past) OR anything "random numbers", as I've had to back and forth on Patreon for what actually doesn't count as running a lottery or gambling due to all sorts of fun local law. So this is it:
Pick the most interesting/entertaining setting for THE THING to be integrated into. Where it lands/enters is up to you, it doesn't have to be more than a paragraph long, but basically pretend this is a pitch for it as a project whether it's something more abstract or just a scene that comes to mind. Three most interesting answers get a copy of the game for either Steam or GOG (your pick).
Thanks as always for your support!
Comments
The thing and dungeon crawler carl
Anthony Edwards
2025-08-15 19:40:37 +0000 UTCThe Thing. On Sesame Street.
Aphotic Arts
2025-05-22 06:45:39 +0000 UTCOne thing that could get me into the movies would be The Thing landing and messing up a small tropical resort in the off-season. Hurricane season swept through and the next plane/boat won't be back for another few weeks. The A/C is on the fritz because the kooky repairman is a conspiracy freak and keeps trying to contact government satellites or something. There's some man-in-black type hanging out in the tiki lounge hanging up on his phone call whenever someone else seems to walk by. The concierge is a local who grew up with his grandpa talking about some terrible monster that lives in jungle with the body of a jaguar and the head of a parrot or something. There's a biologist who takes a "reading" somewhere, goes wide eyed at the screen and says, "But that's impossible!" Kind of an inverse of the endless frozen wasteland of the arctic circle, but still equally as isolated by the ocean, scaling the island as small or as big as you would want. You could have your MacReady as some washed-up American pilot or sailor drowning their sorrows after an assignment went bad. You could run through the exposition, explain why this once-popular resort is kind of dumpy now, have a character talk about the thing in the jungle, (there were those strings of disappearances back in the day remember? the goats and those farmers?) A 3-minute scene showing the Thing coming out of hibernation and how it ended up there. Some kills in the jungle before it finds a way to the resort, then you got the thing. (The chef is acting weird, he always talks about his weekly Friday barbecues now he's flinching from the fire). The last few characters find some weapons left by smugglers and arm themselves, make molotov cocktails from the bottles of high-proof liquor no-one can stomach. They kill the monster with some old military explosives that have been in a hidden World War 2 stockpile for years. Final shot is the last person/people laughing and swigging trash tropical liquor watching the kitschy facade of the hotel burn down from all the destruction, having killed the Thing before the boatloads of tourists show up the next morning. I'd watch it. Would love a thing-ified parrot, who used to be someones pet, mocking the remaining survivors by speaking. Longtime viewer, patreon of a few months, first comment ever made on here. Keep up the great vids!
Jslobber
2025-05-20 17:57:16 +0000 UTCNot quite a straight answer but: I've been reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series and one of its non-human intelligences is very Thing-adjacent. It's an alien microbial parasite that can infect other beings and inherit their memory and knowledge, and later in the series it functions as a symbiotic being that is essentially always method-acting as one of the people its consciousness copies. Making the assimilating symbiote sympathetic is an interesting twist on the trope. Also I'm still in the middle of the third book but the setting in that book is (appears to be) a paranoid New England puritan-esque setting. That strikes me as a potentially interesting setting for a shapeshifting horror to infest. (Classic horror movie monsters in historical settings is an underutilized concept in general. That Predator movie set in early colonial times with a Native American protagonist was incredible.)
SacredDatura
2025-05-12 08:45:11 +0000 UTCIn a remote USSR Closed City post essential construction and pre massive settlement. Think Aliens 2 colony, fewer than 100 people. Military finds indigenous taiga tribe gooped and brings the only surviving member in for shelter.
Dad's 11AM Southern Comfort Nap
2025-05-08 04:37:25 +0000 UTCHow about a The Thing and Air Bud crossover? So sort of like Space Jam but slightly more body horror, and there's a golden retriever. You could have a reverse Mighty Ducks scene in which, instead of the rich kid getting Jerrymandered onto the good guy team, the dog gets infected by The Thing and switches sides. That might seem like too high of stakes for an Air Bud movie, but here's how we bring it back down to earth: bowling. Air Bud and The Thing together at last in the blockbuster of the summer, Air Bud: Pins and Needles.
ErebusReactorEngineer
2025-05-06 13:53:09 +0000 UTCWAIT HERE'S A VIDEO QUESTION BECause I don't know where else to put it... How disappointed are you about Grim Beard releasing a Butcher Bay deep dive video around the same time as you on the scale of, "Just poor timing for me," to "I hope no one knows how much better someone can do what I do..." all in jest, of course. Just looking for a way to get more people to hear Grim's channel. Thanks for the awesome content!
On904
2025-04-27 22:27:46 +0000 UTCI had two, I just couldn't resist. Everyone already covered all the cool underwater ones, so here they go. A group of Spaniards and their local interpreters, under Francisco Pizarro, are ranging far from the main conquistador forces during the conquest of the Incan empire. In the bridged valleys high in the mountains, the glaciers hold an ancient and terrible menace from beyond the stars. After a brief skirmish with locals, and being warned not to disturb the shrine of Supay, the evil god of the underworld. In search of riches and a safe place to lick their wounds, they end up thawing the Thing, and what ensues is a paranoid, terrifying attempt to rally both their own forces and locals to combat this demon while warily watching one another. High mountains, treacherous bridges, a naturally mixed and distrusting cast, spooky caves, lots of terrifying superstition to justify the create as opposed to the sci-fi explanations from the movie. The second is during the Russian Revolution, the American Expeditionary Forces manning the Trans-Siberian railway encounter a raving, lone Russian from one of the countless factions involved in the civil war. He tells horror stories of a beast consuming men, of howling monsters in the night, and bloodstained clothes being the only marker of their friends being replaced after the local warlord recovered something from the frigid north. Suspecting it to be one of dozens of real life and insane warlords like Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the Americans set off to investigate, and bring back an unexpected guest to the armored train. Now they have limited time to identify the create among them and deal with it before the train arrives back in civilization.
Gary R
2025-04-22 18:17:11 +0000 UTCI'd like to see the Thing appear within a group of people who have to trust one another to defeat it. Maybe a prison, or a post-apocalypse like It Comes At Night. My favorite aspect of the Thing is how it erodes trust between people. But flip that around and introduce a hostile group to a much greater threat, and see how trust can be difficult to build up instead. All the while the Thing tries to keep the infighting happening.
Sebastian
2025-04-21 23:20:43 +0000 UTCI think it would be cool if it crashed just on the perimeter of the prison causing guards to go check it out and put the prison on lock down.
Ian T
2025-04-19 01:22:05 +0000 UTCI think the idea of the Thing having a setting like a medieval village could be interesting. They don't have all the technology to figure out the "rules" as easily and could be a sort of spin on Town of Salem. The villagers might go on a sort of witch hunt for it and maybe they'll hang the disguised thing, only to realize that that won't work on it and it escapes. They might mix superstitions and practical ideas to somehow learn the nature of the monster. Not sure how to explain why the thing wouldn't just leave the village, but whatever I'll think of it later.
Winston of Magoo
2025-04-18 23:59:17 +0000 UTC
