Episode 201: You Don’t Need to Drag Pokemon Into It
July 29th, 2016 | Robin
Pokemon fever is back and more feverish than ever. As Pokemon Go breaks loose of the Gaming Hut, forcing players onto the actual streets, is there anything we can riff about it that reality hasn’t already delivered?
Ken watched every Dracula flick he could get his hands on, and now the result of that effort, The Thrill of Dracula, awaits your reading pleasure. We open Ken’s coffin to chat about it in Among My Many Hats.
Our amygdalas alert us to danger whenever we see an upside down triangle. In Fun With Science, we go behind the science to make up explanations for this peculiar phenomenon.
Finally, Patreon backer Jacob Ansari wants to know why Ken’s Time Machine was employed to obscure Palermo’s mysterious Blue Room aka Wonderland Chamber.
Get trapped in Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” in Atlas Games’ addictive new card game Lost in R’lyeh. Take a selfie with your purchased copy of the game at your brick and mortar game retailer and send it to Atlas to claim your special Ken and Robin promo card.
Ken fans who did not partake of the Kickstarter can now sink their fangs into the general release of the Dracula Dossier from Pelgrane Press, consisting of the Director’s Handbook and Dracula Unredacted.
You say that’s still not enough Ken for you? Very well, my friend. His brilliant pieces on parasitic gaming, alternate Newtons, Dacian werewolves and more now lurk among the sparkling bounty of The Best of FENIX Volumes 1-3, from returning sponsors Askfageln. Yes, it’s Sweden’s favorite RPG magazine, now beautifully collected. Warning: not in Swedish.
Attention, operatives of Delta Green, the ultra-covert agency charged with battling the contemporary forces of the Cthulhu Mythos! Now everything you need to know to play Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, perhaps extending your valiantly short field life, can be found in the Delta Green Agent’s Handbook. 
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I ordered Thrill of Dracula the instant I learned of its existence. My only disappointment was that Ken did not have room to cover the first sequel to Dracula 2000, which AFAIK was the first/only film to include the counting seeds and untying knots shticks from vampire lore.
Unless I’m mistaken, the amygdala is involved in facial recognition and faces are vaguely shaped like inverted triangles, so that would seem a possible explanation.
If there is a specific response indicating threat recognition, I would suspect that it would be related to the inherently unbalanced nature of the shape, which could indicate something that is prone to tipping over and squashing proto-hominids. And those sorts of things reward further intention.
Or perhaps it’s a psychic “remembrance” of future yield signs.
Or fear of sharks’ teeth.
One of those.
Also, “unassailable”: I don’t think that means what you think it means. 😎
Question: I ran NBA recently for the first time using the Lennart Dossier, and two players decided to engage in conflict. They both tried to make interpersonal spends on the other. My isntinct was to force them to rp the situation, but it left me thinking that gumshoe isn’t well geared to do PvP. Am I right?
was their an outer dark version of pokemon? i briefly skimmed the pokemon part of the podcast and can only remember a burglary and murder based on pokemon go.
Herzog’s Dracula emphasizes Harker as well.
The triangle shape could also be the shape of a predator’s face, which tend to be more triangular than rectangular. Also, an animal standing erect on its hind legs, arms outspread, would have a wide shoulder area and narrow point at its feet, resembling an upside-down triangle.
Along the same lines, a mammalian predator’s nose is very much a triangle shape, as opposed to the more squarish or ovoid muzzles of most prey animals. So maybe we evolved that shape recognition in order to keep from hunting things that were more likely to kill us.