The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery

The Ugly Stepsister is a brilliant retelling of the Cinderella story, refocused on the titular stepsister and changed into a beautifully shot body-horror black comedy about living up to beauty standards in a patriarchal society. Loved it.

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I finally saw Black Hawk Down and, apart from the obvious few problems everyone knows about, it’s still an amazing war movie, and a technical tour-de-force. Impressive.

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Well that aged well 😒 From Mission: Impossible S01E10, the crew are undercover in a Russian (I think?) training program for sleeper agents in the US. They are “tested” by being fake-arrested by the police, and reprimanded for not resisting arrest, which is “the American Way”!

Rollin Hand (Martin Landau), Roger Lee (guest star George Takei), and Barney Collier (Greg Morris) are undercover in a training camp for sleeper agents in the US. They were just fake-arrested by Russians posing as US police, and only Rollin had the sense of protesting arrest, screaming about warrants and civic rights until the police backed off. Yanosh Passik (Arthur Hill), the mastermind and "US culture specialist" behind this training program, shows up and reprimands Roger and Barney: "You were much too quick to be bullied by authority"
Yanosh Passik continues: "That is not the American way. Americans are not afraid of their police"

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I haven’t posted about the good fluffy boy in some time, so here he is, still doing his thing!

Sunrise over Deer Lake Park in Burnaby, BC.
The good fluffy boy is waiting by a trail, with the sunrise behind him
The good fluffy boy is waiting at the top of a trail
The good fluffy boy is cooling off in a big puddle of water

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Another old TV series I started (re)watching lately is Mission: Impossible. Hard to remember a time before Jim Phelps, but Dan Briggs is pretty good too! It all hold up well, it’s suspenseful and often clever. I totally want to make a #TTRPG out of it!

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Went to see Project Hail Mary with the family! Verdict: good good amaze amaze

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Fuck me, my NAS is detecting some potential upcoming failures on one or two of my drives… luckily, it seems that the crazy storage prices are mainly for SSDs, and good ol’ NAS drives only went up by a (comparatively) small margin. But still…

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If you design a Medieval Japan TTRPG, you really need a character class with flatulence fighting feats, as the He-Gassen tells us. Don’t look at me like that, people, it’s just historical fact, I don’t make the rules.

Three farting attackers are thwarted by two men with fans, while one of their buddies counterattacks
Two horse riders do some drive-by farting. They're like the Huns of Flatulence. Unbeatable.
A big showdown between two groups of farters
A small animal (a cat? a dog?) is caught in the crossfire between two farters

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More first impressions on The Avengers: we know that Emma Peel, played by the forever wonderful Diana Rigg, is everybody’s favourite, but her predecessor, Cathy Gale, played by Honor Blackman, is super awesome too! And probably even more groundbreaking for the time!

Steed and Gale having a toast, with Gale showing a rare smile. Apparently the showrunners told Blackman to smile as little as possible, because Gale isn't supposed to like Steed! Steed is supposed to be annoying!
A signed picture of Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale.
Cathy Gale in a full leather outfit. Emma Peel got that from Gale, it seems! Gale was supposed to know Judo, and so Blackman had to learn it. She did most of her own fighting, and had trouble with her wardrobe. That's when she decided to wear leather, and that decision seems to have had long-term repercussions all the way to the present with characters like Black Widow!

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Another old TV series I’m (re)watching is “The Avengers”. I skipped season 1 since almost all episodes have been lost, and headed into season 2. Episode 7 has Steed being tortured by Nazi dentists! Almost 15 years before Marathon Man! Amazing.

"The Mauritius Penny" has a pretty cool plot: a stamp collector gets murdered because he sees an ultra-rare stamp on a delivery list, gets excited and starts talking about it... only that stamp was just a code-name for a clandestine delivery of weapons for an underground neo-nazi group! Simply picking the "wrong" code-name triggers a series of events that brings the group to the attention of our heroes, Steed and Gale!
Steed gets tortured by neo-Nazi dentist women! He goes undercover as one of the Nazi group's members from another chapter, but they see through his ruse when his teeth don't match the records! As the woman proceeds to threaten Steed, she lists all the different cavities that Steed has and that the other guy didn't :D
The neo-Nazi group having a meeting to organize the take-over of Britain.
Steed and Gale are looking at some stamps or something.

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