Welcome to Faked Tales!

Posted on December 24, 2022 by fakedtales

Welcome, I’m Charlie Etheridge-Nunn, a writer and waffler about various things like comics and games in all forms.

Explosion High & Mad Robot Comics

First of all, I write comics at Mad Robot. If you see us at conventions you can pick up my first work in Cadavers: World Gone to Hell, including the tragic horror “Fractured” and the monster noir, “Blob Detective”

My main work at the moment is Explosion High! It’s a comic about a fun and deadly superhero school. In it, a team of lacklustre sidekicks and directionless deities find a home and friends in a place which is literally trying to kill them at every opportunity. It’s full of noise, explosions, dinosaurs and friendship.

Pictures: Explosions and friendship. I assure you there are dinosaurs inside.

You can pick up physical copies at conventions, at Dave’s Comics and the Dice Saloon in Brighton, or Comics, Games & Coffee in Chichester.

Digital copies are available at Itch.io and DriveThruComics. 

Hundreds of students enter, a lot fewer will leave.

There’s a Kickstarter for issue two coming soon, which you can sign up to get notified about by going here.

Climbzilla! The gym class kaiju!

Casual Trek

I started a podcast about Star Trek with Miles Reid-Lobatto, one of my older, favourite writer friends. Inspired by shows like Every Story Ever, Battle of the Atom and BatChat with Matt & Will, we watch a few episodes of Star Trek at a time and rank them against each other on an increasingly large list of best to worst.

Go do a Starfleet!

Star Trek’s kind of a tertiary fandom to us both. It’s been a constant fandom in our lives, just not as much as X-Men for me or Doctor Who for Miles, so we consider that makes us the perfect moral authority on such a subject.

For people more casual than even us, we recap the episodes and try not to overrun too much (although we are keeping record of who’s overrunning more). This is an accessible entrance to Star Trek, even if we get into a great many tangents like the Young Ones, Blake’s 7, the writer Chris Claremont and our combined experiences in Brighton.

You can find Casual Trek on any podcatcher, on Spotify and here.

One of the alternate titles for one of the recent episodes

Who Dares Rolls

I write about indie RPGs for Who Dares Rolls, and put up videos occasionally on their YouTube channel, along with the eccentric, effervescent Mike B.

The super serious logo, made by Mike B from when I was only writing about solo RPGs.

Recently I’ve been putting out some solo roleplaying game Actual Play podcast episodes in my occasional series, “Playing With Ourselves”. These are kind of re-enactments or short story readings, going through games like the letters written in “Quill”, a journal from someone in the nigh-eternal queue to see Edd the Duck’s coffin in “The Queue” and the self-explanatory “You Are Quarantined with Adam Driver and he is Insisting on Reading You His New Script”

Faked Tales

This blog is where I put any short stories, articles or general blog posts about my writing and the popular culture in general.

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Casual Trek Bonus Episode: Uncasual Power!

Posted on December 22, 2022 by fakedtales
Miles told me this scene was real.

Casual Trek is not a Doctor Who podcast. We made this clear from the very start. Much like how I’d be insufferable if this was an X-Men podcast, so would Miles be if this was a Doctor Who podcast.

And yet, here we are.

I’ve been a slightly more casual fan of Doctor Who as I am Star Trek. I came to it late, didn’t care much for it at first and learnt to enjoy the show as time went on.

A lot of the later Moffat years and the Chibnall ones have tested my enjoyment, although there’s always been at least one good episode per series. While I message back and forth with Miles most days, I’d not bothered with the special final Jodie Whittaker Doctor Who episode, but Miles wanted to talk about it and I wanted a reason to care.

Miles suggested we do a bonus episode and I provided the caveats that 1) I not have to watch it beforehand and 2) I not edit it, as I do the editing chores and had too much to do already. He was good with it, so here we are. 

Does Miles convince me to watch Doctor Who? Probably, but can I be bothered to do it anytime soon instead of leaving it most of a year like with the previous series? 

Listen, and find out!

Also as Miles keeps going on about Blake’s 7, I’ve decided not to watch it, which means his choice of episode name went right over my head as a Blake’s 7 reference. There will have to be vengeance.

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Casual Trek Episode Nine: Troubles By Tribbles

Posted on December 20, 2022 by fakedtales

I love a bit of horror, but there was a point watching this trio of Tribble episodes where I snapped.

There are only three proper episodes about tribbles, not counting the Short Trek and a couple of cameos of what I can only assume are neutered tribbles in other shows. They’re a small part of the universe, but an iconic one, being a cute ball of hair that purrs. It’s also got some horrifying implications when you think about the Tribbles and the things which go on with their biology.

Sometimes we have problems with Casual Trek’s format; mainly that the more serialised episodes (I’m looking at you, Discovery) don’t fare as well in translation. I’m still eager to try to call them on their own merits. This time, we’ve got a really cool thing to happen through Casual Trek’s format. We have two episodes of different shows which are both telling different perspectives of the same story, and we have a direct sequel in another show.

In theory this gives us a level of focus we may not normally have, but we still manage to lose our minds with some parts of the stories and go on a lot of tangents. Miles somehow doesn’t go on a long Blake’s 7 tangent, even though I did give him a perfect opportunity. 

The Original Series: The Trouble With Tribbles

Kirk having a time of it, covered in what turns out to be Tribble corpses.

The first episode is one where I’ve not seen it, but I may as well have given the amount of times clips have been shown no images shared.

You’ve got the tension of the Cold War between the Klingons and the Federation in an outpost on the border of both factions. Spies, espionage, fights and all of this is somehow a comedy episode. Even better, it’s a comedy episode that works!

Kirk and Spock act as the straight men to the situation even though they start out trying to be flippant about having to look after grain. The Enterprise crew have some fun on shore leave, get a worrying new pet and get in some fights with Klingons who are also on shore leave.

Deep Space Nine: Trials and Tribble-Ations

Sisko and Dax in their retro outfits.

The next episode takes us to the 90’s and a point where the Forrest Gump technology now can be used on television shows. We’re late enough in Deep Space Nine that there’s been a lot of serious stuff going down, so I’m guessing this was quite a respite.

It’s always nice getting the crew of a Star Trek in an unfamiliar place and the brightly-coloured Star Trek TOS era is a great setting for a break from the otherwise fairly industrial grime of DS9.

I’ve watched this episode once or twice before, but never really paid attention to the plot. The antagonist of The Trouble With Tribbles is out of prison and cons his way to get close to a Time Orb, sending himself and the DS9 crew back to the first episode.

There are fun shenanigans all throughout, as the cast interact with past technology, problems and characters. Bashir has a classic time travel quandary which he approaches in a very Bashir way, and Odo actually smiles.

Watching this immediately after The Trouble With Tribbles was a joy. There wasn’t anything which I was confused about between them and neither is necessary to watch with the other, but they both add more to each other.

The Animated Series: More Tribbles, More Troubles

Kirk, tormented by tribbles again.

Finally, we move on from the initial K7 incident. The Enterprise has to take from automated grain ships back to Sherman’s Planet in order to finally allow the Federation to settle the place. I like the idea of the robotic ships filled with grain being moved about. You’d expect them to simply be crates in a cargo bay normally, but this creates a new visual and logistical challenges.

We also get the return of Cyrano Jones, who I probably mispronounce all the way through the episode. He has some bright pink tribbles, which was the result of someone with colourblindness being in charge of these decisions. 

They can’t breed to the ludicrous level they could in the previous episodes, but there are more troubling implications about what goes on.

The story for this one’s a bit of a nothing, but it’s the first direct sequel to an episode that I’ve seen and after the previous two, it felt fairly nice to get more of this arc.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using this link:

The Big List So Far

Spoilers below if you’ve not seen the episode, but as at episode eight, here’s the big list:

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Casual Trek Episode Eight: Casual Toons

Posted on December 19, 2022 by fakedtales

There are so many Star Trek shows now. It’s incredibly cool, as someone who got into it back when there were four, only three of which were in rotation on the few channels we had. When Miles and I were talking about Casual Trek and the premise of watching three episodes from different Star Treks at a time, we pondered the animations. It was enough having a two-parter to start us off, covering each of the pilot episodes from the live action shows. Strange New Worlds was only just starting to air so we were able to put that off. Picard was going to be difficult so we could put that off for even longer, which left the question of the animated episodes.

If we covered them, it would give us an increased pool of things to choose from and there were some fun ideas which would only work if we included cartoons. Luckily, there were three Star Trek animated series to choose from, so we were able to build a whole episode where we looked at the pilots of each show.

The Animated Series: Beyond the Farthest Star

I’d heard about the animated series, but I never knew where it aired on TV and managed to fairly easily resist buying the boxed set of DVDs. If I was too casual to get those red, yellow and blue clamshell Original Series DVDs, why would I bother with the weird white and orange animated series one?

The most I knew about it came from The Centre Seat, the Star Trek documentary which was on Prime. I’d heard about the re-used animations and some of the old Star Trek plots which never got used and were converted for this. Also that there were some issues with not being able to afford everyone, so Chekhov ended up being not included as an actor.

Beyond the Farthest Star does a better job than I thought of showing things which you couldn’t in live action, like a big weird alien ship. The enemy is one of those cosmic entities Star Trek has a lot of, although it is a big of a whiner. We also get a glimpse of the alien they replaced Chekhov with, although he doesn’t get any lines yet.

Lower Decks: Second Contact

I was so ready to hate this. I’ve made it very clear on the show that I don’t care for Seth MacFarlane’s whole cartoon oeuvre. I’ve enjoyed The Orville far more than I thought I would, although that’s often despite the Seth MacFarlane of it all. I know this isn’t by Seth MacFarlane, it’s by a Rick & Morty person, which is its own problem, but it bears a lot of the hallmarks of his work.

Lower Decks starts off better than I thought, although I’m pretty sure I left it a little while between the first and second episode. Where I’m at now, having seen multiple seasons, I really like Lower Decks.

I think the main difference is that Lower Decks has its daft fun and its references, but it still buys into the world. The hope, neediness and swashbuckling heroism of Starfleet. The fact that a rage zombie virus is just another day of the week, but you’re not going to be completely aloof and deadened to it. I think this is why I’ve got issues with Deadpool, too. He doesn’t sell investment in the world, unless it’s directly about him.

This episode got ranked fairly low, but being here means that there’s nowhere to go but up and it opens up a lot of fun episodes to mix and match with the live action ones.

Prodigy: Lost & Found (Parts 1 & 2)

The most recent Star Trek cartoon was billed as a kind of “Star Trek for kids” and also “We’ve got Janeway”. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. I kind of didn’t bother reading up on it or seeing the fan reaction, which I assumed was going to be negative.

I watched the first episode on Paramount Plus when I was in a Trek mood and I’d been saving Strange New Worlds to watch with my partner. I wasn’t impressed and figured I’d wait literally until I had to watch it for Casual Trek. Seeing the first episode again for the episode I realised something I hadn’t checked before… it was a two-parter.

The episode’s still got that kind of modern CGI kids cartoon kind of vibe, which doesn’t look at first blush like a Star Trek thing. For some reason in my mind it’s more of a style compatible with Star Wars, but there’s Star Trek peppered throughout this. I gather that like Lower Decks, it only improves from here, so I’m really interested in seeing how it goes and may even watch some episodes outside of the viewing requirements for Casual Trek.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using this link:

The Big List So Far

Spoilers below if you’ve not seen the episode, but as at episode eight, here’s the big list:

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Casual Trek Episode Seven: Casual Trek’s Castle of Creepiness

Posted on December 2, 2022 by fakedtales
If you ever wanted to see the inside of a Clanger, this is pretty much what I reckon they look like.

I love horror, so it was great planning and working out how to do a specifically horror-themed episode. There are actually a ton of spooky Star Trek episodes, so I’ve several for future Halloweens, if we’re still doing this in a year or two (which hopefully we will).

The Next Generation: Genesis

This was the first episode I thought of, and one which instantly got the reaction from Miles that he switched this off as a kid. I knew I was onto a good one here. It’s from the furthest in a show’s running that we’ve looked at and it’s fascinating seeing the increase in budget mixed with the balls out insanity that they know they can get away with.

The alternative title for the episode.

Voyager: The Thaw

I must have seen this when I saw the first two seasons of Voyager, but my mind repressed it. This is not a good episode, but when I saw “Evil Clown Matrix Situation” I knew I had to try it. Also Voyager’s been woefully underrepresented, so we’ll be featuring a bit more of them in the near future. If you like a sinister crèche or rec centre, this episode’s got you covered.

The Original Series: Catspaw

Now this is some proper spoopy Halloween party kind of episode. There’s an eeeevil castle, dry ice, skeletons in a dungeon. There are some references to Great Old Ones, a whole Kitten Kong looking situation and Chekhov’s impressively bad wig.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using these links:

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Casual Trek Episode Six: Odo Exploded!

Posted on November 30, 2022 by fakedtales
I was going to put in a photo of a balloon popping, but Odo actually popping looked better.

I wasn’t a fan of the Mirror Universe, although I think it was mainly a case of encountering too many DS9 episodes and the lengthy second arc of Discovery season one. Watching three episodes about the Mirror Universe from different shows was a much more interesting exercise.

The Original Series: Mirror Mirror

Like most of TOS, this was one I missed. Here we discover that the Mirror Universe is basically one running on a betrayal-based society. I thought the government was just based on Klingons, but it’s actually quite different and seems to have started with Earth being jerks.

There’s some fun with Kirk and the rest trying to prevent the Mirror Enterprise doing terrible things and to keep their cover.

Deep Space Nine: Crossover

My main experience of the Mirror Universe has been from DS9 and the universe went through a ton of changes, although it still keeps to the core conceit that they’re all jerks over in the Mirror Universe.

Rather than echo the standard alternate universe story we have a Mirror Universe who also experienced the TOS episode and adapted, we also get Kira who doesn’t care about the protocols of Starfleet.

There was a thing that happened in this episode which caused us to go a bit manic. It was great fun to do and to hear again, hopefully folks will enjoy it.

Discovery: Despite Yourself

Discovery had a few Mirror Universe episodes so it was a case of working out which one to use. This one had the Discovery having their first encounter with the Mirror Universe and ‘Captain Killy’ which was a joy.

There are a couple of issues which feel born more of trying to be a ‘modern’ TV show, like how easily Michael straight up murders a guy and the overall ongoing story arc, but as a whole it holds up alright and is less annoying than I remember when it first aired.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using these links:

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Casual Trek Episode Five: A Lovely Walk

Posted on October 16, 2022 by fakedtales

This episode was a bit of a different one and way more personal than the usual episodes. Having watched the wrong episode and having some personal life things in the way, we wanted to make an episode, but had to go a bit off the beaten path.

I love walking and do it a lot, despite my hobbit-like figure. I’m a fan of wandering the South Downs and had a lot of questions for Miles about how it is to walk in America. He’s a fellow Brightonian and used to the many hills of our fair city (although it may come off a bit less than fair in the episode, admittedly), so I figured it’d be a good perspective.

This was taken on my birthday which was shortly before we recorded the episode.

We also got into Miles’ first encounter with the big roads and an Ed Gein type situation, my anxiety walks at night. As I said, it got oddly personal. We both share a bit in the regular episodes, more so here.

Our inspiration for this episode was Jay & Miles Xplain the X-Men who space out their edited episodes with “Hawk Talk” where they don’t edit and talk about any subject. We’ll return to this concept again in the future. I’m not sure if it’ll be every five episodes or just any time we get under pressure. Because I’m me and we’re still getting used to the pace & technology, I have edited this episode, but cutting the extra time for prep definitely helped us catch up.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using these links:

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Casual Trek Episode Four: Daddy Beard of Sadness

Posted on October 15, 2022 by fakedtales

I’ve been loving Strange New Worlds and pacing out the watching of it. As of writing I’ve still got one episode to go, and I know that it’ll be a shame once it’s over.

I knew the first episodes of Casual Trek would be the pilots, that I wasn’t going to touch Picard for a while and that I’d need to do something special for Strange New Worlds.

This image will make sense if you listen to the podcast

Enterprise: Strange New World

I started looking for other episodes with the same name and was shocked there was only one. An Enterprise episode. I’m sure I’d seen it before when I acquired the first ten or eleven episodes, but I’d managed to completely forget what it was like. I decided to try and make it a ‘bit’ that we were specifically reviewing this episode and that I’d not realised there was a TV show by the same name, although I probably didn’t warn Miles to extract me from the bit as soon as possible. I gather Enterprise gets better later on, but this is four episodes in and it’s uh… it’s not good.

Discovery: Through the Valley of Shadows

There wasn’t a second Strange New World or Worlds, so I decided we’d watch the backdoor pilot to SNW on Discovery. The problem was that the entirety of season two was kind of a backdoor pilot, so this one was the one to go with as it features Pike’s vision.

Then I watched the wrong episode and spent the whole thing thinking the vision would pop up at some point, only to realise I’d goofed. Between this and some medical appointments on Miles’ side of things, this was why episode five would be a different thing entirely and why it was recorded before episode four. The episode itself is fine. I keep being impressed that Discovery’s episodes hold up better on the rewatch for me.

Strange New Worlds: Strange New Worlds

The main event. This one’s a pilot I saw once on my own, saw once with Emma and then watched again for the podcast, and I don’t even mind. It’s really fun and even though Miles is quite right about the Whedony quippiness, I think I’m a bit more immune to it than him. I like Discovery, I experience Picard, I love this. The only shame is that it’s stuck on a channel like Paramount Plus instead of on channels where future generations of nerds can easily access it.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using these links:

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Casual Trek Episode Three: Oh Dear, It’s Blackface!

Posted on October 14, 2022 by fakedtales

We finally hit regular episodes instead of pilots and you can tell by the length of our recaps and my many pages of notes for each episode being reduced to a couple of pages.

As well as our big sheet of best to worst, I have a list of potential themes for episodes and literally the first big one I knew we had to do was Klingons. They’re the big iconic enemy whether you’ve seen one episode or hundreds (oh dear god there are hundreds of episodes, what have I done?)

Sure, I ship these two.

The Original Series: Errand of Mercy

This episode helped solidify what I’ve been thinking which is, “I actually like the mystical space bullshit” which I didn’t care for when I was a kid. There’s a Ren Faire planet and some smoldering tension between Kor and Kirk. We also can’t avoid talking about the whole ‘blackface’ problem with the Klingons, especially in this era.

The Next Generation: Matter of Honour

Next up we have a weirdly mundane episode where the enemy is bacteria! I also kind of love that. There’s an alien I recognise mainly from the Star Trek Collectable Card Game and Riker goes on work experience!

Deep Space Nine: House of Quark

Finally we have House of Quark. This feels like a fun story game like Fiasco where you have to keep escalating things going wrong until it reaches a massive crescendo. When my Star Trek mood hit big time, this was the last episode I watched and having to go back to it really didn’t matter as it’s that much fun.

It’s also got the glorious mad eyes of Gowron which are amazing.

Gowron will return for a Casual Trek Gowron Power Hour

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using these links:

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Casual Trek Episode Six: Odo Exploded!

Posted on October 14, 2022 by fakedtales
I wanted to use an exploding balloon as the image, but nothing could top Odo exploding.

I wasn’t a fan of the Mirror Universe, although I think it was mainly a case of encountering too many DS9 episodes and the lengthy second arc of Discovery season one. Watching three episodes about the Mirror Universe from different shows was a much more interesting exercise.

The Original Series: Mirror Mirror

Like most of TOS, this was one I missed. Here we discover that the Mirror Universe is basically one running on a betrayal-based society. I thought the government was just based on Klingons, but it’s actually quite different and seems to have started with Earth being jerks.

There’s some fun with Kirk and the rest trying to prevent the Mirror Enterprise doing terrible things and to keep their cover.

Deep Space Nine: Crossover

My main experience of the Mirror Universe has been from DS9 and the universe went through a ton of changes, although it still keeps to the core conceit that they’re all jerks over in the Mirror Universe.

Rather than echo the standard alternate universe story we have a Mirror Universe who also experienced the TOS episode and adapted, we also get Kira who doesn’t care about the protocols of Starfleet.

There was a thing that happened in this episode which caused us to go a bit manic. It was great fun to do and to hear again, hopefully folks will enjoy it.

Discovery: Despite Yourself

Discovery had a few Mirror Universe episodes so it was a case of working out which one to use. This one had the Discovery having their first encounter with the Mirror Universe and ‘Captain Killy’ which was a joy.

There are a couple of issues which feel born more of trying to be a ‘modern’ TV show, like how easily Michael straight up murders a guy and the overall ongoing story arc, but as a whole it holds up alright and is less annoying than I remember when it first aired.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using this link:

In addition to that, if you like what we do and want to support us monetarily, we have a Ko-Fi page and we even had a first supporter on there (thanks Amo!)

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