@BESW ooof ooof ooof ooof ooof ooof

@AncientSwordRage For your consideration:

I'll be watching both I think

Thanks

Less directly related to earlier conversations, but you might also be interested in Cold Crash Pictures' reflection on Verhoeven's directorial signatures.

But Maggie Mae Fish's, in particular, directly and specifically calls out how Verhoeven depicts unethical behavior without valorizing it.

I do love a good video essay

While your here, any idea why drivethrurpg.com/m/product/314622 is half price?

I'd post it on main chat but I sunny know if there's a bigger sale on

A glance at their twitter account doesn't suggest anything except maybe they decided to do a discount in response to being featured on Polygon? So I'm gonna look at the Polygon article and see if that mentions anything larger.

Just a passing mention, and none of Arcanist Press's other products are on sale, and DTRPG doesn't have the usual "this is also sold in bundles with..." banner, so... probably not part of a larger sale.

I've posted in main then

...I was really hoping Eric Sophia had done an essay on Robocop, but they don't seem to have.

I was hoping for more from Mike Hall, but after conversations here, he leans too heavily on the Hero's journey idea

Using the hero's journey as a default lens for analysis of existing works is... not inherently an awful idea, because SO MUCH of modern pop narrative is soaked in it that it'd be downright irresponsible to ignore. But a lot of analysis acts like that's not a choice enforced by production systems, or treats adherence to the journey as a sign of quality.

@BESW I think it works for his T2 analysis as Cameron leans on it so heavily

I don't think I've seen any of Hall's work.

I forget whether it's central to his analysis of Jurassic park, but I get the impression he's picked up on Spielberg's intent

My major concern would be if he focuses on the journey to the exclusion of other lenses.

I'll grab it in a sec

Oh, you might enjoy Cold Crash Pictures' essays about Jurassic Park.

@BESW he does I think, from what I remember?

...yeah, I'm not gonna be able to watch Hill without having something else to do at the same time, or I'll start yelling at the screen.

I'm sure he'll get to better stuff eventually but I'll have to wait 'til I have the right setup to get to it with him.

@BESW I can imagine

Correction: I assume he'll get to better stuff because you've recommended him; if I came across this video without a recommendation I'd drop it in the first couple minutes for hilariously poor thesis statements that seem to be completely unconnected from reality.

Both videos you sent me were excellent by the way

@BESW I found it interesting, but by no means watch it just in my recommendation

It was probably interesting to me as it's one of the first video essays on cinema I saw, but I think I prefer the two you shared

It was mostly I guess, where he lines up what look like deliberate parallels that look like director's choices. Like the roses and the glasses, or the choice of colour between Hammond and Goldblum's character in Jurassic park

Having seen how nuanced Cold Crash and Maggie Mae Fish were, Mike Hill could definitely have benefit from a more nuanced reading in their videos

James Cameron's done great stuff, and T2 is excellent, but he's cherry-picking Michael Bay. The video was uploaded in late 2016. Bay hadn't had a blockbuster since 2014, and he's deliberately making popcorn fodder. The blockbuster summers of recent memory in late 2016 featured top-ten films like Iron Man 3 (the one where he struggles with PTSD), Interstellar, and Rogue One, so the implicit claim and Bay is representative of the blockbuster landscape falls flat.

(Also, "I googled an obsolete brain theory" is not the best frame? It feels like he picked it just so he could make fun of Bay more easily by saying "explody man no think good." That's about where I stopped, when he was saying things everyone already agrees with about Bay but using obsolete science to make it sound like he's not just playing the crowd's favorite hits.)

Yeah, I may have to rethink how much I enjoyed his videos

His Jurassic park one may be better?

For a deep dive into Michael Bay, perhaps Lindsay Ellis's series "The Whole Plate: Film Studies through a Lens of Transformers"?

@AncientSwordRage You may also like Eric Sophia's CurioVids which I linked above, they also go into video games and TV series and such. I really enjoyed their dive into the video game Control.

Yeah don't watch Mike Hills analysis of Jurassic park unless you can channel your shouting into something productive

Hill frames Grant as going on the journey of bad father/bad man to good father/good man. But the whole video is no where near as nuanced as the first ~7min of the cold crash one.

@BESW I'll take a look

I'll also mention Princess Weekes (nerd analysis from a queer Black femme perspective that puts a lot of focus on the interaction between media and reality) and Mikey Neumann (celebrating films as miracles of achievement no matter how bad they are, looking for good things in bad films and diving into the "nobody knows what they're doing" aspect of how films get made).

And there's no shame in appreciating the creator who brought you into a medium or genre, no matter how much better stuff you find once you're there!

If you wanna get into screenplay analysis, I'd recommend Lessons from the Screenplay. Michael Tucker looks at how scripts, specifically, contribute to the quality of a film, and what lessons screenwriters can take from specific famous films in that regard.

Evan Puschak of Nerdwriter is focused on researching the behind-the-scenes events and craft that go into making a film, but I find that he sometimes focuses on the craft at the expense of the humanity (or lack thereof) of the production experience.

That goes double for CinemaTyler. Great research, but an inclination to fawn over auteur personalities.

@AncientSwordRage One of the things I appreciate about Cold Crash is that he'll go deep into a reading, like Bellin's, go through all the ways it works, and then explode its flaws with his own perspective.

He'll give Bellin all due credit, but he's doing his own work and research, not just regurgitating Bellin's.

Yup it's great

@BESW I'm aware of Princess! Mainly via Tolarian Community College (MTG channel) but I still enjoy her vids

I'll have to go back over these and add them to my watch later list

@ThomasMarkov was it getting bad answers/comments while I was asleep? If so it doesn’t have them now which is good

We’ve deleted two.

The most recent deletion was from a 1 rep user and it’s getting a lot of attention, so I protected it.

@ThomasMarkov winces thanks a lot.

I kinda wish I hadn’t posted it now

@BardicWizard Don't! It's done and you got some good info.

If anything, it's sad to see the community here react the way they have.

It’s generating a lot of uncomfortable stuff and mid December is often a vulnerable time for me anyways so I’m already not in the best state to deal with stuff and throwing this out to the internet at large is not going great

By upvoting @ThomasMarkov.

want me to move this back to dragons again?

It can be disassociated from your account, which I think would be favorable to deletion.

@NautArch if you do I'm happy to follow

@NautArch yeah, can we?

← 14 messages moved from TRPG General Chat

@ThomasMarkov I’m not gonna do that now. It’s done, it’s out there, and retreating back into my shell like a tortoise isn’t going to help me feel better about it

I’m probably going to accept your answer, then deal with the fallout by standing tall, shoulders back, and head up. The way I wish I could do at school

@BardicWizard Unfortunately, I think that's the best you can do (and all of us.)

It’s out there now, and even if it is hard and I regret posting it, I don’t regret that I need an answer and have to go to the internet for it.

Much like many of the other horrific things going on around us, this is another where the disgusting underbelly of a community is shown.

Whether or not it's better to give it the light of day or not is up for debate.

I think it generally is good, but it's tough.

@NautArch yeah. And I fully expect that either one of my friends is going to notice the similarities in timing between our gaming session and the time I posted this and connect the dots or that the person at school I suspect associated me with this username will start making my life wierd. All I can do is stand strong and be the person I am, rather than feel ashamed

(Easy to say, less so to do, though)

@BardicWizard That's all we can ever do :)

@ThomasMarkov good move +1

So here's an idea for an RPG that was inspired in part by @BardicWizard's question. Or at least a mechanic based on the personality trait being important to the character. You get a deck of cards that represent your characters traits, and you can also shuffle in some random ones (the group would pick which ones would be safe for the group). When your faced with a challenge you reveal the top card if the deck, and if you use it, you get a bonus and if you ignore it you get a penalty, to the roll.

I was thinking if this as a way to get some people who wouldn't normally share someone's POV to be more understanding if a trait was revealed they wouldn't normally put down on the character sheet.

@AncientSwordRage when you publish let me know, I'd probably buy it

@KorvinStarmast it's just an idea atm, but if I ever make it, I'll post it up here

@AncientSwordRage I’d be interested too, but not sure if it’d work for any group I play with

@BardicWizard yeah it's going to need one heck of a robot head

seems to me that the bigots will use it as a way to continue bigotry by appropriating something or other or by saying that playing a game about identity that involved (possibly) being the target of discrimination is equivalent to actually facing that discrimination

and people who actually regularly deal with stuff might be cautious about engaging

although that’s just me

and I’m coming at it from the angle of “a game about identity being important is going to involve how the society responds to that identity, which can include discrimination”

which is a thing to think about — how does discrimination play a role in the game, since (I presume) we’re talking about identities that are different than the cis-het white male that today’s society appears to consider standard (and that seems to be the majority of gamers I know that aren’t my friends)

It’s just a thought though

@AncientSwordRage what does that metaphor allude to? I kinda get that it is used to say that it needs more than just the idea, but I’ve never seen it before

@BardicWizard jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2018/10/28/the-giant-robot-of-offense

@BardicWizard it's definitely something to think about

@AncientSwordRage that’s cool.

@AncientSwordRage yeah; the way I see it, it could be awesome, but it could also encourage systematic oppression, bigotry, and/or hate depending on how it was handled

as it’s kinda seemed as a result of the question I asked

@BardicWizard it was also part of the link BESW shared in main, Nice Boys and Rusty Swords

Also, I don't think I'd intend for it to be just about gender/orientation

You could just as easily pull "Likes cats" from the deck, and it's be your job to weave that into the scenario

@AncientSwordRage yeah, that’d be a bit limiting — although this applies to anything possibly divisive

“Likes cats” might not be divisive but race, class, gender (even before lgbtq stuff), age, etc, all would have to be handled carefully

although now I have the mental image of someone pulling “likes cats” out and trying to weave it into the scenario of, say, arguing they need a raise in salary

what would that even sound like — “Yes, boss, my 2700 cats agree with me that I need a raise so I can feed them”

Or “you’re not paying me as much as others cause I have a cat and you like dogs better”

@BardicWizard I'm also thinking you could remove divisive card from your decks if you wanted? I don't know, like you said there's definitely some room for abuse

@AncientSwordRage that’d be good. Similarly, maybe have explicit safety tools like “at any time, if you are uncomfortable with a card you have drawn, you may [discard it/return it to the deck] and draw again”

@BardicWizard yeah it needs that

@AncientSwordRage no kidding. Still, I’d totally play it or help write it though if you do ever get around to it

Seems more writable than the last RPG idea I had 😅

@AncientSwordRage which was?

@BardicWizard Its even hard for me to remember ball the details I wanted to add to it

And I've got conflicting notes as well

The jist is d&d ish stats, but the six are paired as internal/external mind/body/soul. That and a skill would go into a dice pool, and you'd look at the number of die (d12s) over 8 for successes, under 4 (I think) going into a limit break pool to use later. At one point, you added up the values of the successful die for another part of the outcome, e.g. a 12 and a 9 gave a score of 21, to be used for ... Something?)