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 Steve and Jeff spent a day at Fan Expo Boston and brought back the whole thing: Chris Evans, the Hobbits, The Boys, and the moment they told Colby Minifie they'd fan-cast her as Cascadia in Dungeon Crawler Carl. Plus what a con actually costs, why six and a half hours isn't enough, and the trinket trade that turned 30 homemade 3D prints into a floor full of new friends. 

The event Fan Expo Boston — Menino Convention Center, Boston MA 2027 dates: December 3-5

Vendors and makers we traded with

• Windy Ridge Makers — 3D printing and painting, DCC Book Nooks, Ren figures
• Scorch Design (@scorchdesign) — coasters, and they put an Original Geek sticker on their booth
• The Colorful Geek — geek tees and stickers
• Nella and Pendragon (@nellaandpendragon) — art and stickers

Charity groups on the floor

• Massachusetts Ghostbusters — replica Ecto car, firehouse, and a ghost
• The Star Wars group running the walkthrough set for Make-A-Wish

Panels covered Chris Evans · Elijah Wood and Billy Boyd · The Boys cast (Karl Urban, Laz Alonso, Colby Minifie, Erin Moriarty, Valorie Curry)

Also there: Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Dominic Monaghan, Ashley Greene, Kristin Kreuk, Tom Welling, Michael Rosenbaum, Erica Durance, Daphne Keen

Mentioned: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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Some of the monsters know they're monsters. And they can't leave.

Book two of Dungeon Crawler Carl drops Carl and Princess Donut onto the third floor — and starts quietly asking a question the games we grew up on never did: what if the NPCs are aware? Jeff and Steve roll the d20 and let the dice decide how they review Carl's Doomsday Scenario — no plan, no idea what topic's coming until they're already saying it.

This roll landed on the good stuff: the creeping cosmic horror of self-aware NPCs and whether Dinniman planted that dread too early, Carl's slow turn from "they're better off dead" to realizing they're real, and Audette's first sneaky moves — the specialized-build advice, the manager skill, and how a former-child-actor class quietly reels Mordecai in. Plus the case for why every D&D player owes it to themselves to read these for the class design alone.

Haven't seen our full Dungeon Crawler Carl episode yet? Start there — link below — then come back for the book-by-book Random Reviews. And if you haven't let Jeff Hayes narrate these to you yet, fair warning: it ruins every other audiobook for you.

Book three's coming.

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from the people who lived it.
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🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
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Only one Spider-Man is allowed a 10 on Steve's scale. Jeff disagrees. Loudly.

The dice decide how we review Spider-Man: Brand New Day — we set the topic, the d20 sets the direction, and we don't know what we're saying until we're already saying it. This roll landed on the two best arguments in the movie: whether the Department of Damage Control is the darkest turn the MCU's taken yet, and just how rewatchable this thing actually is.

Jeff and Steve get into Damage Control's evolution from comic-book punchline ("who fixes all those buildings?") into a paramilitary mutant-hunting machine, Tramell Tillman quietly stealing every scene he's in, and the sacrifice that proves how far these guys are willing to go. Then the real fight: Jeff calls this the best Tom Holland trilogy, Steve holds the line that No Way Home is the only true 10 — and the two land on different scores.

⚠️ Light spoilers ahead — Jean Grey, the X-Men setup, a couple of crossover faces, and where all of this points for Doomsday and the multiverse.

Which Spider-Man is your 10? Drop it in the comments.

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🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
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The first edition of the OG Call Sheet is here — the segment where we cast our favorite stories the way they were meant to be. 

With a Dungeon Crawler Carl adaptation reportedly in the works at Seth MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door, Steve and Jeff go one-by-one through 13 characters and lock in their dream cast — from Carl and Princess Donut to Mordecai, Odette, and Elle. Expect a couple of eerie matches, at least one hard disagreement, and a lot of "wait, why didn't I think of that." Who's your Carl? Who's your Mordecai? Let us know. This is a standalone cut from our full Dungeon Crawler Carl episode. Dungeon Crawler Carl is written by Matt Dinniman; audiobook narrated by Jeff Hays / Soundbooth Theater. Fan commentary only — unaffiliated with the author, publisher, or any production. 

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
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A guy in his boxers. Crocs. A talking cat. Try recommending that to a normal person — they'll look at you like you've lost your mind. Then they read one page of Princess Donut, and they're in the cult too.

Steve and Jeff roll the D20 and let the dice pick the angle on Dungeon Crawler Carl, Book 1 by Matt Dinniman. Top-three characters, the odd-couple buddy-cop dynamic, the great info-dump debate — and why this series turns readers into believers.

Impossible to sell, or exactly why the cult works? 🎲

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🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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Dungeon Crawler Carl book 1 review — Steve and Jeff break down Matt Dinniman's LitRPG phenomenon, Princess Donut, and who should play Carl in Seth McFarlane's Peacock series.

The apocalypse will be televised. A guy in boxers, Crocs, and a leather jacket chases a cat into the street at 2:30 a.m. — and the world ends. That's page one, and somehow it only gets more unhinged from there. In this episode we get into why a prize-winning Persian cat casting magic missiles is the best character decision in modern genre fiction, whether the Soundbooth Theater audiobook actually beats the print copy, and the print-only Pineapple Cabaret nobody with an ebook knows about.

Then we debut a brand-new segment — the OG Call Sheet — and cast 13 characters for the upcoming Fuzzy Door / Peacock adaptation. Talon Warburton or Tom Holland for Carl? Seth McFarlane himself as Mordecai? We agreed more than we expected to, and disagreed exactly where you'd hope.

Audiobook or print? Tom Holland or give the newcomer a shot? Drop your cast list in the comments — we're reading them.

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🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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The rules of Random Review are simple: we set the topic, and the d20 sets the direction. We know what we're reviewing — we just don't know how. This time we handed the dice a post-apocalyptic novel and sat the author down to defend it in real time.

Steve and Jeff are joined by indie author Alex Grass for a review of Drek, his surreal, funny, end-of-the-world novel where a coroner ends up with the boogeyman on his gurney, three twisted religions go to war over the body, and the history of how it all fell apart survives only in the wreckage. Steve opens the segment with a critical fail — which turns into a genuine debate about whether a deliberately disorienting first act is a weakness or the whole point.

From there: worldbuilding without the dreaded info-dump, why the best writing sounds like the way you actually talk and think, and a shared appreciation for stories that are absurd enough to be believable — think Twelve Monkeys or Brazil. Plus the worst kind of story anyone can corner you with at a family gathering.

If you love post-apocalyptic fiction that isn't afraid to laugh at itself, this is a good one.

Follow Alex on Instagram @infernaltramps, and pick up Drek and his other novels wherever you get your books.

Original Geek is a podcast about Gen X geek culture — sci-fi, fantasy, D&D, comics, and everything that shaped us. If you're enjoying the show, follow, rate, and leave a review. It genuinely helps.

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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Author Alex Grass joins us in the basement for the debut of Artists Alley — and he brought the whole shelf with him: Black River Lantern, Influencer, Drek, A Boy's Hammer, and the brand-new short story collection Infernal Tramps (out July 15).

We start by trying to define paranormal horror and immediately discover the category might swallow the whole genre. Alex traces horror's origins back to the late Victorian collision of scientific progress and spiritualism — M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, ghost stories — and argues that in the beginning, essentially all horror was paranormal.

Then things get personal. Alex talks about the three months in rehab that split his life into before and after, and the strange fact that the healthier he got, the grayer and more twisted his fiction became. Infernal Tramps is the result: a museum guard whose single bad impulse unravels an entire city, a plastic surgery story that ends somewhere no one sees coming, and a Goodreads reader's perfect description — Twilight Zone meets Hostel.

Our Random Review puts Drek under the D20 with the author present, and Steve rolls a natural 1. The category: "Narrative Fog" — the accusation that the book's opening is so deliberately disorienting that readers put it down. Jeff, who read the thing in a day, mounts a hard disagreement built entirely around one image: a coroner with the Boogeyman on his gurney.

Geek Court takes the case that splits the genre: does horror need humor? Alex builds his argument on Chris Rock and a South Park line about how comedy rots — and how horror, given enough distance from the tragedy underneath it, can rot right back into comedy. Steve, a working stand-up, argues the banana peel and the scream live on the same continuum. Jeff counters with Hereditary and Midsommar. The verdict is not what he wanted.

We close on Geek Evolution and a rant we didn't script: the gatekeepers are gone, the access is a genuine renaissance, and that's exactly the problem. The noise is deafening, and the only thing that cuts through it is work you'd be proud of even if nobody ever finds it.

Also: bourbon as a bridge between broken people, why nobody should ever write an info dump, the horror movies that got to us first, and a story about Goodreads that we are not going to summarize here.

FIND ALEX GRASS
InfernalTramps.com | Instagram: @infernaltramps | Amazon & Goodreads
Please rate and review his books — for an indie author, that's the whole game.

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Steve Scarfo & Jeff Shaw

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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We rolled the d20 on Disclosure Day, Spielberg's new alien movie, and the dice picked our fights for us.

Roll one: the cold open that skips the close encounter entirely and throws you into Act 2 mid-chase, with Daniel already running and zero exposition to catch you up. Roll two: the train car climax — a practical-stunt escape sequence with a full John Williams score behind it. Two big action beats in a movie we swear isn't an action movie.

Plus Colin Firth's loyalty-scrambling casting, the JJ Abrams / Super 8 train callback, and the question of whether any of this actually earns a theater ticket.

No prep. No script. Just two geeks reacting to what they just watched.

So settle it for us: is Disclosure Day the third Spielberg alien movie… or does that count collapse the moment you name them all?

 #DisclosureDay #Spielberg #CloseEncounters #ET #Sci-Fi #MovieReview #GenX #GeekPodcast #OriginalGeek 

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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How many alien movies has Steven Spielberg actually made? Ask three geeks, get three answers — and that's exactly the fight we pick this week.

With Disclosure Day finally in theaters, we put Spielberg's entire alien run under the microscope: Close Encounters, E.T., the new one, and the two movies nobody can agree on (looking at you, War of the Worlds and that Indiana Jones with the crystal skull). Steve holds the line at three pure Spielberg originals. Jeff refuses to let it go.

Along the way: a full Disclosure Day breakdown, a Random Review roll that lands on the movie's Act 2 cold open and that wild train sequence, a Geek Court showdown over whether it's a worthy entry, flashbacks to Devil's Tower and a popcorn bucket that scarred Steve for life, and the Reese's Pieces deal that changed product placement forever. Plus the rant that fuels the whole episode — Spielberg had the perfect chance to connect these films, and didn't.

It all comes down to one unsettled question: do you count every movie with an alien in it, or only the ones Spielberg built from scratch? We're not agreeing. Maybe you can settle it.

Listen, then tell us where you land: [email protected]

 #OriginalGeek #Spielberg #DisclosureDay #SciFi 

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

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