stdesjardins

I played two RPG sessions online this weekend, as part of the Games on Demand Online event. (I have played in non-virtual Games on Demand at Origins in pre-pandemic times.)

The first game was Beak, Feather, and Bone, a map-labeling game where players choose factions among a city of crows and take turns labeling and describing buildings on a map of the city. I chose the Strangers faction (other options included Farmers, Miners, Thieves, Elders, Mages, etc.) on the grounds that I had the least idea who they were or what they might want. My initial vague thought was that they might be a party of adventurers who had come to the city hunting for a treasure, and the buildings I established in the first few rounds were consistent with that, establishing an interest in archaeology and magical detritus, but by the final round I pivoted, and had them open a tea house where they performed divinations by casting gems and shiny stones and reading patterns in how they fell, and in the epilogue I described the wave of gray-feathered immigrants that followed, and described that section of the city becoming home to restaurants, jewelers, and artisans.

Then I was one of three GMs this afternoon for a game of The Barbarian's Bloody Quest (by Vince Baker), in which the barbarian Hildax faced obstacles on a quest to slay Kendivan of the Tower of Tach, the wizard who slaughtered his village. (It's a one-player, multiple GM setup, with the facilitator playing the barbarian.) So much fun. Practically the first thing I established was that Kendivan was also a gourmet chef. When Hildax arrived at the wizard's island one of my fellow GMs described the wizard's extensive herb garden and orchard, the other suggested that he might also grow various poisonous plants, and I pointed out that he would naturally separate the poisonous plants from the culinary ones to avoid cross-pollination, so on one side of the path was a very tidy herb garden and on the other side a more wild, overgrown garden that provided excellent cover for approaching the tower. As we approached the end of the session, Hildax had been immobilized by the wizard's spectral servant, and Kendivan, angry that he'd insulted his cooking, was forcing him to taste the sea kraken soufflé that had just come out of the oven. He had made the soufflé from the bone that the barbarian had been using as a rudder, which he'd sold to a fishmonger earlier in the session, so to wrap things up I explained that if the person who killed a sea kraken ate its flesh they gained a temporary immunity to magic. We finished just in time.

I haven't found a consistent home for playing RPG's since I quit the Gauntlet. I should maybe make the effort. I think The Barbarian's Bloody Quest and its companion games would be easy to facilitate, and maybe I will make an effort to recruit a couple of players and run a session or two sometime.

Not much news. Whether my tests are positive or not depends entirely on whether I'm wearing my reading glasses. I have been assuming for three days that surely the next day's test would be negative, and every day there's just an incredibly faint line. I do feel better, but have a limited amount of stamina and my voice is not great, even though my pulse-ox levels are fine I feel like I don't have a lot of lung capacity.

My plan for tonight is to wait until the odds of meeting anyone in the hallway are minimal, and go down to the courtyard with my e-reader and get some fresh air for a while, because I am going a bit stir-crazy from not having been outside for three weeks.

I found Six By Sondheim on HBO Max when I was in the mood for something light. The documentary discusses Sondheim's work through an exploration of six songs, and I have seen enough Sondheim documentaries that it all seemed very familiar, but still pleasant in a "if you like this kind of thing you'll like this kind of thing" way.

The Haunted Strangler was a low-budget Boris Karloff movie written as a vehicle for Boris Karloff late in his career. Karloff plays a writer and social reformer investigating a twenty-year-old murder in which he's convinced the wrong man was hanged. He thinks the doctor who performed the autopsy, then vanished, was the real killer, and he both proves his theory and realizes that he is the missing doctor, and lapses into homicidal mania. It's not a very good movie but it's a very Karloff-y movie, if you want to see Boris Karloff playing the kind of role you expect to see Boris Karloff in this movie certainly delivers.

Next up was The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I enjoy a good odd-couple romance, but I didn't see how they were going to get to a satisfying ending given the premise, and wow they really didn't. The whole story goes completely off the rails IMO, ( spoilers ). Old movies have really screwy notions of fidelity but this is going above and beyond in the "is this really a good outcome" sweepstakes.

Next, The Eternals. The Celestials and their technology are very Kirbyesque, I liked the golden-line visual manifestation of the Eternals' powers, the movie worked for me on a visual level. The story, the action, the level of humor was all fine. I just felt the movie was a little too much in love with the worldbuilding, and I didn't care enough about any of the characters, and I don't care about the characters they spent time building up for future movies. I liked it more than, say, Black Widow, I may well re-watch it, I am not thrilled with it.

The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love is a 1995 movie which the Sundance Festival put up for everyone with tickets to test their viewing arrangements before the actual festival movies go live. It is a very '90's lesbian movie, and I don't think I could add anything to Roger Ebert's review.

I was thinking of re-watching Ikiru, since I have a ticket to the Bill Nighy remake in a few days, searched for "Ikiru" on the Criterion Channel, and ended up watching Zatoichi and the Fugitives instead. Takashi Shimura, who starred in Ikiru, has a supporting role as a generous and kind doctor in the small village where Zatoichi stops for a time. It wasn't a very good movie, but Shimura was very good, and it's always interesting to see how a charismatic, professional actor can liven up an otherwise uninspired film.

Total movies so far this year: 13, including 2 movies I had already seen.

I went to two plays last week, Flight at Studio Theatre and Sam and Dede at the Washington Stage Guild. Flight is effectively a single-person experience: you sit in a booth facing a giant turntable, and a series of miniature scenes (with figures and scenery like you might find in a model train layout) appear in compartments in front of you while a recorded play chronicles the adventures of two boys travelling from Afghanistan to London. It was an interesting experience, I liked the non-traditional format, but it was a very bleak, dark story, which I am not so much in the mood for. Sam and Dede, on the other hand, a play about Samuel Beckett and André the Giant (who was driven to school by Beckett when he was a child) was much lighter but not as well-written. I had tickets to White Noise by Suzan Lori-Parks at Studio tonight, but I decided case rates are much too high to see a play with more than eleven people in the audience, and I donated the tickets back to the theater.

Haven't read much lately, but Megatropolis, an art deco re-interpretation of Judge Dredd, is worth taking note of.

Down Argentine Way is a 1940 musical starring Don Ameche and Betty Grable which I watched on The Criterion Channel. The plot is nothing much, and the stars' acting ability is sufficient to the plot. What makes this memorable are the rousing song and dance numbers, which are mostly in the form of nightclub acts that the characters are watching for plot-related reasons, which means they can get people who are really really good at singing and dancing without worrying about whether they can act. This is part of a collection Criterion debuted this month featuring the Nicholas Brothers, a black dance team who despite their immense talent were relegated to bit roles that could be cut from films without compromising the plot, because Southern theaters would not show movies with prominent black actors. They really are incredible dancers who make their bodies do things that actual human people who are not cartoon characters should not be able to do. Charlotte Greenwood, who was nearly six feet tall and about fifty years old when the movie premiered, played a man-hungry aunt who admitted to being thirty-one. She's obviously intended to be perceived as ridiculously vain and a figure of scorn, but, you know, good for her.

It's a fun movie and I recommend it, but I am not sure it will join the list of musicals I am ever eager to re-watch.

Crime Wave is a 1953 Sterling Hayden picture that came to The Criteron Channel this month. After three escaped criminals get in a shoot-out with a police officer which leaves one of them wounded they decide to seek refuge with an ex-con who's gone straight. They threaten his wife to keep him in line, and recruit him to carry out one last big job before they flee the country. It's a solid B-movie which gets a bit heavy-handed at times. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but I have a soft spot for films which are more ambitious than they need to be, and I can believe it may actually have made part of the audience feel more sympathetic to the difficulties ex-cons face, which is not something I believe of all movies that try to address social issues. Plus, like most B-movies, it's pretty short, so worth a look.

I don't know if I'll succeed in keeping the resolution, but I'm going to try to keep up with a log of all the movies I watch this year. Movies watched so far: 2.

I made it nearly 54 years through life on my starter set of hips, but as I'm sure you know those things have only a fifty-year warranty so the time came to upgrade to an implant that will make every airport security screening just a wee bit more inconvenient. ( more about hip stuff )

I've only ever had a single dose of the MMR vaccine, since the two-dose vaccine only became standard when I was in my twenties. Someone on my timeline mentioned getting their immunity checked, and with the current measles outbreak in the news, I decided it was worth walking to my doctor's office to get my blood drawn. The good news is, I am immune to measles; the bad news is, I'm not immune to mumps or rubella.

Very scary, but at least now I know and I will get vaccinated as soon as possible. If any of you are in any doubt about your immunity, I urge to get a blood test the next time you're at your doctor's office. It's quick and easy.

I'm starting a five-session Masks campaign tomorrow. I'm using the Legacy playbook, so I've had to invent backstory for the previous heroes in my Legacy, and naturally I've tried to work some interesting family dynamics into the premise. (Masks is a teen superhero RPG, and a good character has lots of hooks for teenage drama.)

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Who the Hell's Bonnie and Clyde? is a Hungarian drama based on the memoir of real-life bank robber Tünde Novák. (The title comes from the girl's reaction to seeing a newspaper article calling them "the Miskolci Bonnie and Clyde", which is also the Hungarian-language title; presumably they changed it because few people outside Hungary know where or what Miskolc is.) At first, I thought the ending was a bit abrupt and confusing, but then I worked out that the DVD glitched at a particular point in the movie, and as soon as I skipped past that it was fine. It's as much a story about the controlling relationship between a teenager and her older boyfriend (just to be clear, she's the one in charge) as it is a crime movie, and the suspense of their efforts to stay ahead of the law is well handled. Recommended.

The Court of Last Resort contains four episodes from a 1957 television series, dramatizing the work of the real-life organization founded by Erle Stanley Gardner which worked to improve the administration of justice, primarily by investigating cases of those wrongly convicted or imprisoned. I was pleased to see that two of the cases involved efforts by the Court of Last Resort to obtain pardons for prisoners who they felt had successfully rehabilitated themselves. (In one of those cases, they actually found evidence of innocence, but the other case involved a prisoner who was unquestionably guilty of a brutal crime.) On the whole, I felt this was a case where dramatized recreations were less effective than a documentary approach would have been, and a good nonfiction book treatment would probably be superior to a filmed documentary. Flawed, but a worthy project and I'm glad to have seen it.

I had never seen Brave, and while it's worth familiarizing myself with major cultural touchstones, I couldn't help noticing that the four screenwriters and directors on the commentary track were all men. This basically earned a "Meh, I guess that was okay" from me.

Dheepan, which I watched in December but received in November, is the story about a refugee family who aren't really a family; they're three unrelated Sri Lankans who buy the passports of dead people and have to pretend to be a family to get asylum in France. It's a story about assimilating into a new life, and about resisting assimilation, filmed with non-professional actors who give amazing, compelling performances. It was originally conceived as a thriller, but in the course of making it the screenwriter and the director dropped most of the thriller elements, focusing on the quieter domestic drama. A smart choice; it would have been even smarter if they'd gone further and eliminated the remaining thriller elements, which include an over-the-top violent finale, but it's still a masterpiece. Highly recommended. (I had, as it turned out, seen it already, but not recognized it from the brief description. It's worth re-watching, and the commentary track was good, so I don't mind.)

I recently started a DVD rental plan with Netflix, and since then I've watched almost a dozen movies. Seems like it would be nice to do quick reviews of the movies I've watched, and since that's too many to do all at once, I'll break them up into a few batches.

The first movie I rented was Colossal, a rather odd monster movie starring Anne Hathaway as an unreliable screw-up who moves back to her home town after her boyfriend dumps her, and then discovers that under certain conditions she can manifest as a giant monster in Korea. The movie logic is very much more metaphorical than realistic, but it's a sensibly handled metaphor, and when I said this was a monster movie, I wasn't referring to the giant monsters crushing buildings. It apparently grossed only $4 million on a $15 million budget, which is a terrible shame, as I thought it was excellent.

I then watched the first few episodes of Peter Gunn, a detective show from the 1950's which is noteworthy for its award-winning score. It's very stylish, and makes excellent use of B&W cinematography and jazz music, but the stories were somewhat less compelling and found myself finishing the DVD with less enthusiasm than I started it. Glad to have tried it, but I won't be getting any more episodes.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties, based on a Neil Gaiman story, is a very bold movie. It may not be a masterpiece, but over-the-top visual style makes it fun to watch, and I'd rather see an original but uneven movie than something polished and predictable.

Mary and the Witch's Flower is a Ghibli-style movie made by animators who had worked at Ghibli. An English dub is available on streaming Netflix, but I got the DVD for the sake of the Japanese soundtrack. I may prefer originality to polished predictability, but, you know, the Ghibli formula is appealing enough that I will accept polished predictability. It's an enjoyable movie full of likeable characters, and I'm good with that.

This was written in response to one of the daily challenges on the Writing Excuses cruise: to write a 250-word story about useless superpowers.

The second-best thing about telekinesis is not having to carry keys. (Most people think mechanical locks would be easier to open, but that isn’t true. Tripping a solenoid is easy, if you know where it is; turning tumblers takes more control and more strength, and I’m pretty weak, I can only shift a gram or two.)

The absolutely best thing about telekinesis is flossing. I haven’t had popcorn stuck in my teeth since I was twelve, when I got my powers. Dislodging plaque is harder, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The trick is not to rush. I can clean my entire mouth in thirty-five minutes, and when I’m not using my teek for anything else I do, over and over again. I have the best teeth. (I still brush every night. No matter how clean your mouth is, you need fluoride.)

Naturally, I became a dental technician. My parents don’t understand why I wanted to be a tech instead of a dentist, but, honestly, cleaning teeth is just way more fun. At work I clean teeth the old-fashioned way, of course, with a little stealthy extra. More probing than cleaning, really. When I find a problem, I make sure we get extra-good X-rays. If they’re not scheduled for X-rays, I give them a little push:

“Oh, did that hurt, Mrs. Kovacs? Let’s have the dentist take a look at that.”

I love days when I get to be a superhero.