The Gaming Den

I'm putting this in the rocks thread because it is better than it sucks...

The Discovery Channel has a reality show called "Undercover Billionaire." The premise of the show is interesting: billionaire goes undercover as a newb in order to start a million dollar business with nothing in 90 days. The premise actually says dude will start with $100.

I don't know how much help the guy is getting behind the scenes. And the premise has already been shown to be false because dude has started with privileges that aren't mentioned, but are included. He has a pick-up truck. He has a warm coat. He has a smart phone. He has clean clothes. Dude has a camera crew that follows him around. Those things are worth more than the initial premise of $100.

I'm hoping to learn some stuff, though. And it's nice to see a rich dude getting some empathy for people in a soup kitchen.

I just binge watched The Boys. It's better than it had any right to be.

The comic suffered from Garth Ennis trying to be memetic Garth Ennis (out Preacher Preacher, in his words) and not having anyone to really reign him in, as well as mostly sticking to the premise that superheroes are useless and worthless, making them so pathetic that you question why they weren't killed off long before the series starts, rather being than compelling antagonists.

The comic actually makes the superheroes mostly competent, if somewhat underprepped and sloppy. It also avoids leveling the playing field, so while pretty much every fight in the comic is a curbstomp by The Boys, the fights in the series have them barely surviving and mostly running away when possible. And Anthony Starr's performance as the Homelander is great, able to simultaneously be extremely confident and charismatic, the most powerful man in any room, and a sociopathic manchild completely starved of real human affection and desperate for approval.

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The comic book boys were on Compound V putting them on par with most of the supes. The TV show boys are not.

I think they're using the same stylists since Butcher looks a lot like Jesse Custer with the hair style.

I stumbled upon a show called A Billion to One. It's a project from a company called CollabFeature - they are a loose film company made of filmmakers from all over the world who work on projects together. Out of 16 episodes, I've made it through five. They're short, addicting, and very bingeable. The story is about people trying to win the fortune of a secretive, ailing billionaire (it is not safe for children or workplaces).

The quality of shooting and acting is variable because each setting is shot by its own cell of filmmakers. I'm actually enjoying it, though (the worst acted location - Dhaka - has my favorite character so far in it). You get to see different cultures participating, and lots of people's stories. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I really like it.

It's streaming on Amazon Prime.

Note: While most of the locales speak English, there are frequently scenes in some other language with English subtitles.

I've been watching The Toys That Made Us on Netflix.

It's always entertaining, at least. And mostly positive.

https://www.amazon.com/Sandy-Crisis-Tri ... =8-1-fkmr1

Short story available for Kindle. Full disclosure: Ramnza (Mrs. FBMF) wrote it, so I may be biased a bit.

synopsis wrote: End of World Preppers Incorporated, or E.O.W. Prep for short, takes pride in offering everything from emergency bug-out bags for the everyday consumer, to city-wide catastrophic response units, complete with training, advancement opportunities, and dental. In order to deliver the best products, E.O.W. Prep puts their teams through intense and realistic training simulations. It’s in the new hire paperwork.

But when Sandy’s training exercise takes a realistic turn, she learns that she’s the only zombie expert in the room (never mind that her knowledge is based off of movies; no one needs to know that part, especially Daniel Park). Sandy must somehow lead the remainder of her team to safety. Is that real blood? Did Mike from accounting just try to tear off someone’s face?

No matter how realistic and terrifying the exercise becomes, Sandy knows this is her chance to finally prove herself and maybe get a promotion! And that’s exactly the kind of skills E.O.W. Prep is looking for. Can Sandy lead her aggravating team members out of the building alive? Or will she leave them all behind?

Game On,
fbmf

I've been gathering up Palladium books as I think about running a TMNT & Other Strangeness game and found that.... Rifts Dimension Book #9 just... doesn't exist? Like, the Dimension Books run 00 (Manhunter) to 15 (Heroes of the Megaverse), but #9 just never got released.

Because Palladium.

I guess there was some stuff like "Ok, DB #9 will be about (X)!" "Er, does that even justify an entire book? Wait... maybe?" and then... it just never got released.

How does this company even still exist? lol

Yeah, that's what I found when I tried to figure out what the deal with it was.

Not quite rocked, but I just finished the first episode of Lady Dynamite with Maria Bamford from 2016. Everyone is at least kind of a terrible person, it's got her dealing with a lot of her issues, and the jokes that land are real funny.

Started into Netflix's "Another Life" spaceship drama.

The flying saucer design in the initial scene of the show rocked me. Still recognizably a flying saucer, but updated and innovative.


(Sadly that is the only truly "rocked me" part of the first 3 episodes)

The first episode of the Dark Crystal series on Netflix is pretty good.

The negatives I've heard about the series so far has been that it sometimes tries to acknowledge the movie, which I don't remember being bad (but I last watched probably on VHS).

I wasn’t super impressed with first episode. Dunno the pacing was a bit slow for me and if I hadn’t been a fan of the movie I’d probably never go back. I wasn’t jazzed about skeski origin since it seemed different than movie but meh. For 1000 trine the skeski have been unreliable narrators.

Gelflings scared the fuck out of me when I saw it as a kid, they still scare the fuck out of me now. Waay too uncanny valley for my tastes.

Really great puppetry, though.

Rewatched Wind Rises... the heroine really feels like a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki's first waifu, Lady White Snake:

https://twitter.com/HokutoAndy/status/1 ... 9430245376

He's talked about the profound effect having a waifu had on his teen self:

"[As a teen] I fell in love with the heroine of [Tale of the White Serpent]. I was moved to the depths of my soul and- with snow starting to fall on the street- staggered home. ...I spent the entire evening hunched over the heated kotatsu weeping"
-The State of Japanese film 1988


Love how every single background character in The Wind Rises is 'alive', living their own life, wearing their own set of clothes, reacting and acting on their own.

Miyazaki also shows off his mega military otaku credentials by depicting the first air loss Imperial Japan had (G3M bomber shot down, they had extremely flammable wings with fuel tanks that were unarmored), to the Republic of China airforce using aging Curtiss Hawk III's

I got to episode 7 of the Dark Crystal. The 2 new characters are the best part of the series so far.

My god the Hyzenthlay II HG 1/144 scale gundam model kit is a beauty

Again... Putting this in Rocks because I'm not lost.

I didn't hate the first episode of Batwoman. The opening scene has seriously bad CGI and I had to talk myself out of judging the show for it. But I don't hate the show yet. It's pretty clear who's who. I'm interested in how it turns out.

It will most likely end up losing my interest like the other shows, but the batworld was always the most captivating for me.

I'm 62 years late to the party, so this post is going to be more like a confession than a recommendation.

As it turns out, The Bridge On The River Kwai is pretty good. I feel bad about not really understanding this, because I kinda have a bias against many old movies and old war movies in particular. So long ago I mentally filed away River Kwai as a lauded movie that I probably wouldn't like for stylistic reasons and never really looked into it more than that. As it turns out, the bits that would probably seem dated and/or implausible in other contexts helped make the movie feel more surreal to me, which is fitting given that the movie seems to be about Alec Guinness losing his mind in the most British way possible.

Whipstitch wrote:losing his mind in the most British way possible.

On a train while the person sitting next to them yells something subtly racist into the bottom of their phone?

Close; the movie is set in WW2, so the railway isn't actually finished yet and the British guy is pretty patronizing about it.

There's a similar movie called Merry CHristmas Mr. Lawrence starring David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra), and it's mostly driven by homoeroticism to kiss David Bowie on the mouth

Fluff and Smoke is a serviceable story for Shadowrun, and pretty entertaining. I'm not sure if it's all there, but the old Tumblr site is gone.

I did note one stand-out character: a disheveled drunken middle manager easily swayed by flattery by the name of Pat Goodman.

So with Halloween approaching my kids wanted to watch some scary movies (ages 12, 8, 4). I don't want to traumatize them so we've watched several movies that are supposed to be scary but not TOO scary. My 8-year-old has really taken a shine to the Tremors franchise, and we've just finished watching all six movies.

It isn't Casablanca, but the movies hold together surprising well across all of the sequels. There's some humor in all of them, but I don't think they set out to make a ridiculous movie (a la Sharknado).

Tremors 1: Theatrical film that introduces subterranean PreCambrian monsters that awaken in a small Nevada town
Tremors 2: Direct to video; one of the primary protagonists from the first film is hired by an oil company in Mexico to deal with the same threat. One of the supporting characters (Burt) from the first movie also helps him - he becomes the primary protagonist in all future movies. It is revealed that the creatures have a life-cycle with another form; the new form makes the original strategies obsolete.
Tremors 3: The movie returns to the original town; people in town are trying to make a buck off the monsters (like Loch Ness) but they're not all gone. We learn that they have a 3rd life-cycle that makes them even more dangerous than before.
Tremors 4: This movie is a prequel and is set in the Old West. Burt's ancestor is the protagonist. Despite this happening before the events of the original movie, it doesn't really shit all over continuity.
Tremors 5: Now they have to fight them in South Africa.
Tremors 6: Now they have to fight them in the Arctic

Even though I had a bit of fatigue going into the last two movies, they weren't bad. Throughout, they do a pretty decent job of blending CGI and practical effects, so there are only a couple of cringeworthy scenes (mostly when the monsters are flying).

-Username17