All the people who are going to Mastodon will very soon realize that they haven’t replaced Twitter with it — they just have one more completely different social media account to monitor! Yay!
The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery
Burnaby by night
Caught up to The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4, and quite disappointed that they didn’t show more of the resistance networks and outcasts of Gilead… Instead they rush back to the same few characters. I haven’t seen season 5 yet but I suspect it keeps going downhill from there.
After watching a couple artists live stream, it looks like I’m way too impatient. They take their time while I’m often hurrying through the second half of a piece and end up unhappy
Caught up to Westworld season 4, which was a huge disappointment for me. Season 3 was the one I liked best, because it was basically full-on cyberpunk action and fun!
I watched a horror movie with an 8% score on Rotten Tomatoes… FOR SCIENCE! It was EVERYTHING I HOPED FOR OH MY GOD
Lore, Tropes, and Goals: The Problem with New Settings
There’s this preconception in roleplaying circles that game settings are easy to get into if they have a book or movie about them. Middle Earth is “easy to grasp”, people say, because you “just” need to read a couple of (overly long) books, or watch a couple of (overly long) movies.
But I was watching my first Actual Play of The One Ring recently and it was set in the Second Age of Middle Earth: the coastal line of the game map looked familiar but all the names were “wrong”. I didn’t know where the player characters were from, who their allegiances were to, or where they were going. It was just a bunch of random Tolkienesque names to me. But I was familiar with the tropes, and I understood their simple short-term adventure goal. And that’s all I needed to follow along.
I didn’t really like any of the segments in A Field Guide to Evil, but I would LOVE to see more anthology films like this: each story is a folk-horror tale from a different country, directed by a local filmmaker, in the local language.
We just finished our first Traveller adventure! (High and Dry) I’m super happy to have finally started playing this venerable game. Also, the players are so pissed at the previous owners of that ship that they want the next adventure to be about hunting them down…
It’s time once again to tell Adobe that I’m cancelling my subscription, so that it offers me half-price for another year. It’s also time once again to check back on Affinity and realize they are still missing the one or two features I need. Oh well.