World of Darkness Aesthetic

My wife and I have been watching an inordinate amount of TV lately, but it isn't all bad. Years ago we had to wait for re-runs or TV marathons to see our favorite episodes of classic shows; now they are just a few clicks away.

The Roku box is not only a time-suck, but also a window into the past. It's very interesting to go back and watch some 90's television and observe the tropes, anachronisms and characters of shows like Doogie Howser, MD and The X-Files. One thing I've been spotting right away is how open these two shows are with medical records and confidentiality. As I'm learning in my medical assisting classes, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed in 1996, well after these shows got started.

Watching a lot of X-Files, I'm also brought back to a nostalgic feeling that I got from the World of Darkness. On the show, the antagonists are not always fully bad, but they are all twisted one way or another. The scenes are dark and the plot is conspiratorial. The show didn't start out as the overly complicated to the point of absurdity X-Files of later years. The early episodes have a grungy, gothic punk feel. Is it any coincidence that The X-Files hits on a lot of the same subject matter and feel as Vampire: The Masquerade, an RPG set in the same time?

So far I've watched a fair amount of episodes from seasons one and two. Some noteworthy plotlines:

-Werewolves have been living on an Indian reservation. The original one is killed, but a survivor has been bitten and bodies start showing up.

-A man who is at least a hundred years old emerges from torpor every thirty years to eat people's livers before he returns to his hand-made cocoon.

-Vampires stalk a gothic, blood cult club and claim new victims nightly.

-A Vietnam veteran who underwent an operation so that he'd never sleep comes back to kill off his squad after developing psychic powers. He uses fake weapons and people to do real damage to his victims by convincing them that what they are seeing is real.

-A computer-controlled skyscraper is programmed with artificial intelligence and starts to kill people that threaten its existence.

Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (VTES) is a collectible card game set in the World of Darkness. At this point, I've been playing VTES for over four years and it has become a bit of an obsession. I'm very into gaming and to have a game that you can play over and over again with different results is really nice. I'm not someone who likes to play a ton of different games because of the burden of learning all of those rules, playing the game once and then shelving it. When do you get to enjoy it? I've found my niche and hope to enjoy it for years to come.