Der PigDog's PigBlog

This post has some bad language in it, including gendered and homophobic slurs. It Was a Mutual Decision 's pitch is strong, incredibly strong, maybe the single best pitch for a game I have ever heard: you are in a breakup, as civil or toxic as you like, and one or both of you may be a horrible rat-human monster. Oh, and the game ends either when you've both gracefully exited the relationship, or one or both of you are dead. Also, it's a team-based game: all the boys play the girl, and all the girls play the boy. -- Every single time I have delivered this pitch, I see eyes light up. It's so obviously fun, funny, and resonant. Cover of It Was a Mutual Decision with a thumbs-up representing my positive opinion of the game Unfortunately for the reader, there are no digital copies, it is not currently in print, and the writer has no immediate plans to make it available again. I ordered a copy off ebay but it got snatched by porch pirates. Luckily when I was complainin...

The first half anyway. As is usual in these superhero movies, it gets worse the longer you think about it. 3/5. Sorry folks, this review is lower quality than you might be used to getting from this blog, it's been a long day.  The film lacks thematic unity; its first half sets up really interesting, incisive questions, and then the back half ignores them in favor of yet another "destroy a cgi city with little or no actual human cost" drearily familiar from Marvel. (Yeah there's also the invasion sequence in not-Palestine/Ukraine by not-Russia/Israel, but that's very clearly  not  the actual climax of the movie, just a bit of added stakes. Plenty of brown people die in that fight scene, off-screen.) Superman's interview with Lois was the height of the movie. I keep trying to remember the character's name, I know it's not Peter Parker. Clark Kent. Fuck. Great chemistry. Big fan of Rachel Brosnahan going back to House of Cards. This whole line of question...

I watched the trailer for 28 Years Later  a few months ago. There's a eerie sample playing in the background, somebody repeating some creepy phrases. Today I looked up the sample. It's from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, "Boots". Here's a fantastic reading. Be warned, it's also disturbing. I read a lot of Kipling as a child. He (and Tennyson) wrote poetry a child can love, and short stories too. But I threw him down in disgust at "White Man's Burden" and never picked him back up again. Even so many of his lines echoed through my mind, all my life. Nowadays a lot of his stuff comes off as stodgy, over-serious, outdated. I won't read "If" again if I can help it. I'm glad to see he wrote at least one good poem. Orwell wrote a pretty good essay on him.  It's Orwell, so there's still plenty of bullshit to disregard -- "I don't say that it's a true thought, merely that every intelligent man who hasn't deluded hims...

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer. I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim sh...

I'm 10 or more session reports behind and it's time to stop pretending to write the old ones and start actually writing the new ones. Here we go! Second session in Simon's Under the City . Just Jay and me. He is returning with his character Hanbul Al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic and newcomer to the city. We determined that he's living in the crusader state of Odessa, and filled out a lot of detail about the city, its current religious and political tensions, and his place in it. We started with some  downtime maneuvers , three of them since it had been three weeks since the last Under the City session. Normally that would be so much window dressing, but he spent a week collecting rumors in downtime, and he rolled the rumor "Several prominent citizens stand accused of grisly murders." I don't give bum rumors, the whole point of the rumor table is to see if you hear anything scenario-relevant, so we know it's going to come up sooner or later. We figured out who ...

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 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 ...