Der PigDog's PigBlog

A new cut of Dracula (1931) by some internet guy from FanEdit.org . The pacing just better in this version; I prefer it to the original. Dracula is a very good movie, and if you haven't seen it, I recommend it! I've also seen Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1958), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Of those, Nosferatu the Vampyre is head and shoulders above the rest, followed by Shadow of the Vampire. Maybe Nosferatu is good if you listen to it with a good score and the right color grading, I don't know. Renfield is on a carriage in the middle of Europe. Everybody around him is a superstitious peasant, and he just wants to get his business done. Renfield and the Romanian innkeeper Look at the differences in their clothes and manner. They're suffering from a little cross-cultural miscommunication. The innkeeper is jovial, laughing and smiling, because he is sure that Renfield is just misunderstanding him -- nobody

 I have thought a lot about this while waiting for Eero to write up his CWP and thought I might put mine in the ring first. A lot of it is based on the stuff I've seen in the RPG Theory discord, but not all of it. Some small preparatory notes. The skill system, whatever it is, and the task "system", are totally separate. Their formalisms are just not the same. The task "system" is not a system at all, it is a vocabulary with which you can construct individual task resolutions. Various tasks are so different it would be nonsense to treat them all the same. Simple skill system In the simple skill system, you either have a skill or you don't. What the skill is is completely free-form; anything you can be good at is a skill. At any point, you can declare that you had a skill the entire time, if the skill is consonant with your background and current situation. If you want to train a new skill, go train it, for however long that would take. Maybe the skill requi

 I don't really read comic books. I read a good chunk of ultimate marvel as a child, and then V for Vendetta and Watchmen in middle school. None of it was super fascinating. The dialogue was stilted. The movies were more exciting. The Question is good.  There's a particular kind of grandstanding you see in superhero comics, and sometimes in action movies, a kind of moral self-indulgence. Usually you see it when the hero says "I DO NOT KILL... EVER!". I think it's a pretty good idea to avoid killing people. But the debate can't be about "can we sometimes kill" versus "can we ever kill", because that's pretty silly: yeah, we can sometimes kill. If you've come this far, if you've killed this many people, it's just not psychologically plausible for you to stop here. And it doesn't give you the moral high ground. I like the movie Road House for an example here. Peak nonsense. Bodhi from Point Break has killed his way through

An unexpected pleasure. The only movie I'd seen previous about a character named John Rambo was Rambo (2008), which was not very good. I hesitate to call this "the first in the Rambo franchise" because it so clearly is not the first movie in a franchise, and the spinoffs did it a lot of harm. This isn't an action movie (a movie about violence and acrobatics, which celebrates its material), it's a drama (a movie about human relationships and values) which features a lot of violence. This is a man's movie. There aren't any women in it. Seriously, I don't think there's a single speaking role for a woman. So it's a movie about masculinity. The masculinity here is pretty different than anything you'll see in a modern man's movie, I think. The men here cry. Sheriff Will Teasle, crying after his friend dies and he gets ambushed by Johnny Johnny crying, remembering a dead friend Johnny cries at the emotional climax of the movie. He lets out the