sawall

Legion is absolutely fantastic and just ended yesterday after three great seasons. It's technically a Marvel mutant show but it's so unlike typical superhero shoes that it doesn't really count as being in that genre. The main character is a powerful mutant who starts off in a psych ward who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia because of the voices he hears via his uncontrolled telepathy. The show deals with the dark side of mental health and mutant powers head on. For example, one of the other main characters is a body swapper on physical contact so can't touch anybody. A lot of the show takes place in the "astral plane", hearkening back to some of the telepathic plotlines from the great Chris Claremont mutant books from the 90s. This creates all sorts of surreal situations, and psychic battles play out in this space in super inventive ways, leading into unexpected situations like high stakes psychic rap battles. The show spends a lot of time on character memories and unwinding psychic disturbances, so if you like playing around with variations of repeating flashbacks, this is totally the show for you. The cinematography and set design are gorgeous and surreal. The narrator is somewhat unreliable during season 1. The show was planned to be three seasons, each a different act, and the execution was great and I feel like the finalé stuck the landing. The acting is fantastic, including fantastic support from an unhinged and frightening Aubrey Plaza as well as CWAL favorite Jermaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) playing an older telepath with a penchant for jazz and slam poetry. The writing, acting, design, music, and sound are right up there with Mr. Robot and Utopia. [4.5/5]



The Expanse has become one of my favorite science fiction shows. I love the way that the writers were able to combine a space thriller with a detective story and a major dash of political reality. The first season of the show has a central mystery and it plays out against a realistic backdrop where the "belter" miners and pioneers out in the asteroid belt and beyond are treated like indentured servants were in colonies in the 1700s and 1800s, Earth rules all with an iron fist but the vast majority of their population has a mediocre quality of life on basic income, and Mars is building an alternate political power base to Earth with an ambitious terraforming project that has been going for decades. This isn't a Star Trek utopia and it isn't an Altered Carbon dystopia - it's a believable advancement of our current political structures. There's even some thought about how major religions have adapted to the future. A character later on is a humanitarian priest and the Mormons are working to fund the first interstellar colony ship so they can go create their paradise outside the solar system.

The pacing in the show can be a little off at times but overall I think that it is great and I love a lot of the characters. A huge amount of research and thought has been put into making space travel realistic and aligned with what things should be like in a couple of centuries assuming that we don't suddenly develop antigravity tech or teleporters. When a ship has to turn quickly that means strapping everyone in, putting fluids around them to keep them in place, and injecting them with amphetamines to keep their heart going. At one point an improperly secured wrench becomes a deadly projectile during maneuvers. Space is harsh, and we see lots of different ways that it can kill people. The books go into even more detail about how carefully they have considered realistic technological advancements (e.g., there is a botanist character who talks a little about the way the plant systems work on space stations, but we get many paragraphs of incidental details when we read about the world through his eyes). Speaking of which, I am eagerly awaiting the ninth and final book, which should come out in a few months (the authors have been doing a great job of pushing a new book out every 12-18 months).

There were rumors that the Expanse was about to get canned after Season 2 and Jeff Bezos, who is himself a fan of the books, bought the rights for Amazon Prime to produce it so that he can see the rest of it. [4/5]

Resurrecting this zombie thread to comment... I've been getting a LOT of my political news from American talk show hosts these days. The "real" news is kind of crazy-making for a variety of reasons. So I'll routinely check out monologues and pieces on youtube from these hosts, in this order of preference:
- Trevor Noah (Daily Show)
- Seth Meyer
- Stephen Colbert

I can really relate to this. I've felt overwhelmed by the plethora of new games available over the last few years. I occasionally pick something up that I know I would have enjoyed when I was 20 but most of the big RPGs and strategy games feel like they take too much time for too little payoff. Not sure if this is because nothing really seems all that new or because I am prioritizing my time differently or what. Somethings things will still hook me in these genres like the fantastic Wasteland 2, so I am pretty sure that it is not just me.

I have been going through a backlog of recommendations that I'd picked up in the past and really quite like Terraria, which is sort of a 2d Minecraft with a bit more structure in terms of advancement. I had tried Starbound a couple times previously because I thought I'd enjoy the space theme more, but I like Terraria more because it's just on one world that you are intended to interact with over a long period of time.

I feel like a lot of indie games make certain art and design choices to feel "authentic". This felt charming a few years back but now it feels more like developers are just cutting corners. Maybe this is because of the Netflix-like shallowness that Al's getting at.

Late to the party, but:

I felt the first half of S8 was fantastic then I was let down by all the holes that you've mentioned. It felt to be that everything was pretty rushed and not built up properly. If they were going to have Dany go mad and burn the city, they needed to telegraph that a bit more effectively. Sure she was doing some reprehensible things like crucifying all the nobles of a city, but we didn't often see her angry streak in regular contexts. I was left feeling like they hit a lot of plot points that basically made sense and that the effects were amazing, but that there were big issues with the narrative and acting. For the most part I blame the acting on the directing; I get the sense that the arc resolutions were a big surprise for some of the actors upon reading their scripts and that they may have chosen to tailor their performances a little differently if they had known where they were headed. Dany and Jaime were probably the most jarring in this regard.

My other disappointment that may hold with the books as well is that it seemed like the entire point of ASoIaF was to subvert the fantasy genre tropes and focus more on the horros of war, but we basically ended up falling right back into the tropes with the resolution of the story. Sure Jon goes up beyond the wall instead of being made King like Aragorn, but he still basically wins like the golden boy that he is. Bran being made King felt a little subversive but also seemed so out of the blue that it wasn't all that clear what to really think about it.

I've also got a newer Sony Bravia, which is well known for doing shades of darkness well and was streaming straight from HBO, and it looked great to me with out of the box cinema settings. My take was that they were trying to focus the audience the perspective on what it was like to be an individual in the thick of things (which is totally in theme with the books, which focus a lot on the horror of war) and that, once they were in the castle, it went quasi horror so the dark was to help out with jump scares. It's too bad to hear that some people had trouble with it, this seems like way more of a factor these days with different manufacturers taking different approaches to picture situations.

I'm a bit on the fence about how I feel about the episode. As straight fantasy, it was fantastic, it had a ton of great moments for many of my favorite characters. I was happy to see Arya's development and they gave great conclusions to Jorah and Theon's arcs. Some of the other character plotlines were a little more meh but that's what you get when you stick 20 major characters all in one place. There were some nice little Tyrion/Sansa bits and some other touches as well.

That said, I've always hoped that the whole point of the story was for the army of the dead to grind up the human politicians (including Dany) while they focused on their petty squabbles; I totally resonate with that 'so much for Global Warming parallels' quip. Instead, it looks like Dany ended up sacrificing a huge portion of her army to protect the North's forces while Cersei got to sit back and get defended for free. Presumably the next episode will involve a lot of grumpy Northerns saying "too bad, so sad" to Dany and not wanting to follow her down to King's Landing because they are tired of this crap.

I'm still in the middle of my ridiculously slow rewatch and still haven't even seen Infinity War yet, much less Endgame. Based on reviews I am moderately excited but not in a big rush.



This is an outrageous statement coming from the mod of /r/tayne, for shame!!

I have the same problem with this as I did with Ghostbusters, and that is that.... we need 80s training montages!!!

How do we know that the Ghostbusters got awesome and were prepared to fight ZUUL? A montage showing at least several months of them busting ghosts all around the city. How did we know that Luke was ready to take on Darth Vader and the Emperor? A lengthy squelchy Yoda training montage implying months of intense training.

The new Ghostbusters beat the big bad on their third real outing. Rey is completely amazeballs after having a few chats with Luke in the second film, most of which involved him crankily telling her that he wouldn't train her. I will say that Rey at least demonstrated some fighting and movement chops prior to even picking up a light saber, but there's still the whole matter of learning to learn force use, which seemed like quite a challenge for Luke to get a knack for.

I got the Gloomhaven board game for my birthday and it's definitely worth checking out for fans of dungeon crawlers. It is kind of like what little-kid-me imagined D&D was before I actually started playing it. A gaming session consists of playing a "scenario" (almost always a dungeon), where you set up a map, objects and figures based on what's in the scenario book and then you and your friends fight your way through it. It is based in its own elaborate universe with its own races and classes, but the archetypes will all be pretty familiar. Each character has its own set of cards for different powers and other actions that it can use during each round. When you attempt actions, instead of rolling dice you draw from a deck of cards that is designed to throw in a little randomization but that prevents too many awesome or unlucky outcomes in a row. Gloomhaven doesn't require a DM because monsters also have their own cards that tell you what they do each turn, and monster movement and targeting follows a simple set of rules. The mechanics are awesome and if you love turn based strategy games, the feel is a lot like what you might expect from a cooperative fantasy-themed XCOM board game.

While the base game is already fun, that's just scratching the surface. The game features a massive campaign mode where you can change everything over time based on the rules and the scenario book. Between scenarios you visit the town of Gloomhaven and have mini-encounters, buy things, level up your characters (giving them access to more action cards), donate to the local sanctuary, and so on. The game starts with 6 character classes but there's another 11 that are locked until you reach certain points in the game. They are in sealed boxes so I will have no idea what they are until the game tells us to open them up. Characters have individual goals and when they meet them they will retire, which gives players a chance to play new classes as they go. As you play, new scenarios will open up, which are indicated by adding stickers to a big world map that you pull out when you're deciding to go next. There are lots of decks of cards that represent different things like special events that can happen on roads, what items are in the town shop, and so on. As you play through the campaign, different conditions cause you to add cards, remove cards, and sometimes even literally tear up cards so they can't be used again. You can even enhance your power cards in various ways by paying for and adding little stickers to them. There are several envelopes to open at various points that contain story content and new rules. The game also does a great job of autoscaling difficulty - monster power depends on your party's average character level, so any scenario that you walk into is scaled appropriately in terms of both threat and reward.

I really can't imagine the amount of effort that went into producing the content. There are almost 100 scenarios, 20 monster types, 17 character classes, gobs of items, at least 100 special event cards, and so on. I've played a weekly session during the last few weeks, and I think that there is maybe a year and a half of content to play through if we keep it up at that rate. It comes in a GIANT box (over 10 kilograms) and I ended up buying a third-party organizer to make setup and tear down faster; the box is full of cardboard map pieces, obstacles, treasures, traps, tokens, counters, and so on.

The rules are a bit challenging to sort through at first. The gameplay mostly all makes sense but there are SO MANY rules and edge cases to keep track of. Even after reading the rules and watch a couple videos, my group made some fairly basic mistakes during our first couple of sessions (fortunately ones that made it too easy rather than too hard). Luckily there are great online resources including a fantastic and pedantic PDF checklist for every different game state that you can end up in.

Gloomhaven on BoardGameGeek, where it has been #1 for a while: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven
Condensed Rules Summary, if you want a sense of the scope of complexity: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/142767/rules-summary

Definitely. The American response to anything like this follows a sad and predictable script. There has been a little more traction recently but that hasn't manifested as real political change yet.

if anything it seems like it's working faster now!

I am really not sure what the state of the art is in bulletin boards in this format. They seem to be a dying breed. I enjoy some Discourse boards for mid-sized communities, but have read that it's quite the memory hog.

That Mayan room looks great! The 'wave a thing in front of another thing' is a great mechanic that was used in that Russian Spy Safe House that I'd mentioned. For example, in one part of it you had to reorganize some statues and caused a secret door to open.

We went to an escape room-like thing in Austin a bit ago that was a promo for the opening of Alita: Battle Angel. It consisted of a bar that all the teams could start out in, and then a big open space with different sections presumably based on things from the film. It was set up to run multiple teams at once and to pit them against each other, so there was a big scoreboard in the middle where you could see your points. There were a couple escape room like puzzles that consisted of finding signs with messages and using them to construct other sentences. Most of the space was different stations with a creative range of activities - one of them was a market where you had to tell them what was in bags based on feeling them, one was a security station where you had to watch video monitors for criminals and identify where they were, and so on. Actors were roaming around that you could interact with who would give you clues as to where to go next. Also the end of the event was some kind of a race that you could be on, so you'd also have chats with characters about who their favorites were. My only disappointment was that we were limited to an hour and there were probably two hours of content to experience; we missed several stations that seemed like they'd be fun.

It wasn't very challenging and the production value was really high with fantastic costumes and props - lots of cool scoreboards and video displays used in a way that integrated well with the rest of the set. There was also a great theme bar on the way in where you could get a drink and settle in, interacting with one or two characters from the start. And of course there was a gift shop at the end along with a big screen showing the film trailer on repeat. Here's some press coverage of it that has some photos of the great props: https://www.polygon.com/entertainment/2019/...rt-to-iron-city

if an email was sent to me it may have been eaten by spam sniffers, who was the sender and i can look around for it
- from the middle of SXSW

This one was pretty fun, and I got to see it with a couple organizers I know who were particularly enjoying watching the slow motion train wreck from an insider perspective. It did get me fretting about Moogfest, which has been rumored to have some weirdness with their production company over the past year and has not yet released a lineup despite the festival being only a bit more than two months away now. At least I have a nice airbnb lined up instead of a disaster tent! 3.5/5

We've been slowly watching though TNG. There are some truly awful bits in the first couple of seasons but it really hits it stride midway through S3. I'm definitely enjoying the journey.

It is totally a thing now. If you check out the Sixthman site you can get a sense for the kinds of cruises that one of the major producers puts on: https://www.sixthman.net . I think there are similar comedy-cruise producers but I don't know as much about it; some minor googling tells me there is an outfit out of Australia called P&O that organizes comedy-focused cruises. The producers make a deal with a cruise line where they book the entire book and then resell the cabins for their event, marked up to pay for the talent.

There's always been music and comedy on most cruises and this is a natural growth where these focus on getting bigger name acts that all fit into a cohesive theme as opposed to just having a random hodge podge nobody you've ever heard of. One of the things that I heard from an organizer of the first one I went to was that a big selling point for the cruise lines is that the alcohol sales go through the roof on the music ones compared with normal cruises. The one I went on had to restock at port 2 days in because they burned through what would taken a week for regular cruisers to consume in that period.

Well I stalled out on my MCU rewatch early on because I don't really want to pay to see the Incredible Hulk and none of my streaming providers have it. I'll get around to it sooner or later but eh, those bad reviews!

But enough of that, I'm here to say that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is fantastic! I honestly didn't have very high expectations based on what I saw in the trailer, which plays up to the silly gags related to having different flavors of Spidey all in one place at once. The story telling is great, voice work is fantastic, the soundtrack is fun, and the art is unique and gorgeous. I saw it in 2d but I bet it's great in 3d because they play a lot of interesting tricks with the art to occasionally show interdimensional overlays, which includes the different Spider-Verses having their own art styles. Sometimes it pixelates out into the dots patterns that were in old comic books, sometimes it goes into vivid 3d, etc. The choice to use Miles Morales as the focus of the story was brilliant because that gave them the chance to show an origin story where the older Spideys could be mentors. 4.5/5.

That looks fantastic. I've got a friend who is spending a month in Barcelona RIGHT THEN too...

I forget if I had admitted this here but I went along on a cruise that featured the Barenaked Ladies and it was actually pretty fun. The whole thing is pretty chill because you are with a group of like-minded people who are in for the long haul. In that case the artists made themselves pretty accessible; they wandered the decks, sunbathed where everybody else was, ate at the buffet, and so on. BNL played three nights and they brought along tons of little indie acts to create a full schedule in all the venues on the ship. I've heard that on other music cruises an artist will just get on at one port, play, and then get on at the next port, so how this kind of thing goes might depend a lot on how the bands want to interact with their fans.

A friend of mine is actually currently on Holy Ship, which is some sort of insane rave boat. It's gotten a bit of a reputation and it should be telling that the next word in the Google autocomplete when you type in "Holy Ship 2019" is "arrests". Apparently local law enforcement loves their random bag searches when people board.

Just did a tiny bit of research on the state of Sixthman cruises (they ran the BNL one I was on) and there's a.... Trailer Park Boys cruise. I have no clue what goes on at one of those!

http://www.trailerparkboyscruise.com

Grandpa speaking: I tried playing Fortnite and couldn't find anybody and kept getting eaten by the barrier.

Star Wars sounds like a fantastic universe for a RPG. I've been aware that they have existed but have never dug into it very deeply. So many great archetypes! It's really one of my favorite fantasy settings.

In a fit of weakness I agreed to show up to a couple Magic the Gathering "drafts" and quite enjoyed it. When Magic first came out I played once or twice and appreciated the mechanics, but the card collection aspect of it tripped off alarm bells that it was a giant money pit so I resolved to abstain from it completely. Fast forward 25 years and now I am playing Magic in a way that I feel vaguely responsible about.

When you conduct a "draft" you buy a bunch of booster packs of Magic cards from the most recent set, four for each player. This is usually around $15 or $20 a person. During the draft you each open a pack look through the cards, pick one, then pass the leftovers to an adjacent player. Repeat until you're out of cards and packs. Then everybody has some time to build a deck from the cards that they had picked (you draw 60 and build a deck that uses 30 of those), and then play tournament style.

This is pretty great because one of my biggest complaints about Magic and CCGs is that people are forced to pay their way to success. A draft is all about having the skill to pick out cards, building a deck from those cards, and then playing that deck effectively. As an added bonus, if you sell the cards you picked online to people who are buying their way to win in tournaments, you can make back close to what you spent on your buy in.

We are living in 1984, and Big Brother is us. People willingly post photos and tag people in them and upload the complete contents of their address books to social media corporations with question ethics. Nobody needs to spy on us because we do such a great job ourselves!

I've been on Facebook and have gone through some rounds of activity there and have mostly sanitized my presence as far as everyone can see. But I'm sure that everything that's ever been on there has been backed up by Zuckerberg and is waiting to be used as political ammunition for when he inevitably runs for President. Let's not even think about what happened to all of the (often more candid) Livejournal data once it was bought by a Russian company.

A lot of my friends who would otherwise seem to be savvy keep using Facebook as their only venue for connectivity and party planning, so I have no way to completely extract myself from it unless I want to get in people's faces and expect to not be remembered at times. Given that I now feel like every time I click anything on the site I'm financially and psychometrically feeding the beast that gave us Brexit and Trump, maybe it is time to get into people's faces.

A few weeks back I replaced that 2003 Samsung with the broken remote with a 4k Sony television that runs Android, and discovered that I can eject almost all of the rest of my home entertainment infrastructure. Now I can Netflix/Hulu/HBO/Plex straight to the TV making my Apple TV pointless, my Blu-ray player is gathering dust since I can stream in 4k, and my Switch plugs right in. Incidentally, Android also has a Spotify app for when I get around to signing up for that since everybody I know has it and I need to branch out from constantly watching modular synth videos on YouTube.

I'm using a SONOS Beam sound bar via HDMI-ARC so no weirdness or latency with getting things to the speaker. Incidentally, the SONOS has top notch audio quality and I highly recommend them in general. Allegedly the bar pairs wirelessly with other SONOS speakers if you want surround sound and it will do something smart about latency but I can't be bothered to figure it out as the living room / kitchen / foyer that it's in is only 18 square meters anyway.

I totally recommend my new "throw out all the computers and embrace Android TVs" lifestyle.

Well, I've decided to watch and re-watch the MCU films in in-universe chronological order before I watch Infinity War. Knocked off the Captain America origin (which was better than I expected it would be) and Iron Man (which still holds up), and Incredible Hulk is next. I might also try to watch some of the TV series, but I've already skipped Agent Carter because who has time for all the things?

I'm using the graphic from this CNET article as my guide: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/marvel-cinemati...der-avengers-4/

Marvel released this info, if anyone else is interested in tackling this:

1943-1945: Captain America: The First Avenger
2010: Iron Man
2011: Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Thor
2012: The Avengers: Iron Man 3
2013: Thor: The Dark World
2014: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
2015: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man
2016: Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming
2016-2017: Doctor Strange
2017: Black Panther, Thor Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War

I was optimistic going in to this but it felt like the sort of thing you'd get if a serious fan made a movie about their favorite book and spent all of their time on weird little details to get it JUST RIGHT while totally ignoring the flow and characters. It also felt like the underlying political agenda was getting a bit too close to the surface. With regard to that, I do appreciate that we've got a believable charismatic villain who makes an interesting case for evil vs. Voldemort who just seemed to frighten everyone into submission. I did enjoy some elements of the worldbuilding and appreciate that we've been getting to see different bits of the international wizarding world that were mostly a mystery in the Potter books.

I don't really like the two leads very much. In the first movie I liked the baker, but he was nearly completely pointless this go around and it felt like he was wedged in because people liked him. I also think that adult wizards are a bit boring in general in this world - they can teleport and do all sorts of overpowered things. With the original Hogwarts series the kids could barely pull things off and there was always a sense of danger but with these new ones you never know if the hero will just be able to unexpectedly dump an entire dragon into his briefcase. There's no suspense because it's never quite clear what to feel suspense about. I didn't hate it but I don't think I ever need to go back to it. 3/5.

In other Potter news, I would recommend the BBC documentary about the British Library's "Harry Potter: A History of Magic" exhibition. It's an interesting look at various artifacts of British magic through the history using the framework of what JK Rowling had been inspired by when writing Harry Potter. I bet that a lot of viewers will be disappointed that it is mostly history and not much Potter, but that was a ok with me. 4/5

Fantastic stuff in there. Looks like the PM onslaught was getting to be a bit much?

I see that the mods fake-quit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/marton/comments/9l...g/stop_the_pms/

That was an amazing story. I'll be intrigued to hear about the sentencing. From skimming to the articles that you linked to, I like to imagine that this house of cards is about to fall.

I'm surprised that so much seemed hidden from the jury, especially things like all the booze cans. I suppose that was all considered circumstantial? Like you said, in the U.S. they seem to have a tendency to bring up priors a lot, which seems like it would have slanted things in this case. I can see both sides of the argument for whether or not to allow it but in this case it seems like it may have done a disservice.

One of the things that has stuck with me the most about your account is how the NG*2's were both women and how their attitudes towards another woman's choices led them to that conclusion. It's something I've read about in vague terms in the media and in feminist theory, but this is one of the more concrete examples that I've really seen about it. It tangentially reminds me of some videos I've seen of ladies groups talking about how great Trump is as well.