Skip Week

Honestly... I just have nothing.

I'm sorry.

Brain is being very unkind to me, and I am totally lacking in inspiration.

I'll be back on form sooner or later.

Sorry.

Two next week maybe. At last one.

Sorry.

Coming Out Of Left Field

Some of the best times you can have while playing RPGs is the really wild stuff that you can't plan for.

You know what I mean. That totally screwball idea, that thing that blindsides your GM from nowhere.

See we love it when everything goes to plan, right? We GMs love setting up a moment that goes off without a hitch, seeing the thing develop from point to point until the party are where you want them and the story point pops off. Sure, it's been a little bit hairy here and there - maybe there's been a couple of times where a little handholding was necessary, and perhaps some clues were missed...

...but you got to the bit you needed to get to, and you get to deliver the blow that you had up your sleeve the entire time. And hopefully the party enjoy - or at least appreciate - it.

The stuff of legend, though, is when you go so far off the beaten path that at least one person is helpless through laughter and half of the campaign notes suddenly seem bone-crushingly inadequate for what you are dealing with.

Two examples I will quote include when myself (a sickly but heavily-armoured cleric of Pelor) and my travelling companion (a dashing spellsword) got to the castle of the evil lich in a D&D 3.5 campaign, took one look at the front gates, and flew up onto the roof to go in through the top of the tower - getting the drop on the final boss of what was effectively a dungeon, and having to clean it out after he was dead...

...and the GM of that game pulling exactly the same trick in a Pathfinder game, going into an overrun guard bastion in the first campaign book through the roof. Dropping in, murdering the big bad, getting mythic power, and then liquidising the rest of the fell creatures present like a BlendTec commercial.

Most recently, this happened to me. I was the GM in the driving seat. I've been running a game of Eclipse Phase for a few months - you've probably seen a couple of my blog posts about it, but if not, look here and here, that will clue you in - and I have been typing up each session as a read-along that you can read here. Take a look - it's called Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.

This particular thing is some kind of murder mystery. The party are putting together some clues as to why someone was killed, and they discover that there's a lot more to it than random acts of violence - in fact they have a short list of other potential targets, and one of them correctly guessed the inciting agents within minutes of seeing the original crime scene (much to my combined joy and nervousness).

So they find out the identity of one of the other potential victims, and go to talk to her. One of the characters is highly social, and is also a genuine psychic. So I get ready to provide some snippets of information before the inevitable happens...

...and then the way it gets played out - the interview turns into a confession, which turns into the party smuggling the potential victim (who isn't so innocent herself) off of the habitat in a body bag assisted by octopoid gangsters, stealing her identity, and using it to accidentally incite a couple of stampedes before finally turning the murderer against a mob of gangsters, resulting in mutual destruction.

What started out as being some kind of Maltese Falcon sleuthing ended up like using a laser pointer to direct a cat into a pile of action figures.

And I had genuinely not really planned for that, at all.

But it did the job!

(Meme not technically accurate cos people totally got killed but:)

Fellow Game Masters - I know it's scary when the party go off the rails. I know. But sometimes it will actually add to the world you are making. For me, it produced another long-term NPC that I can use, and some long-term problems that I can bring back down the line. And even if it doesn't add anything - who cares? Sometimes, we're here to laugh like idiots at the dumb things we just did.

That's what the hobby is about, right?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Boogeyman In Three Parts

John Wick is one of the best action franchises that has ever existed, and I will prove it.

I'm aware of the irony of my last blog, calling for a cessation of murdering people and planet alike, being followed by one about an action movie trilogy with a three-figure body count. The incongruity of me not wanting real actual people to die, and yet capable of watching a movie wherein fictional people fictionally die. Yes. Thank you.

Now that that's out of the way.

I've mentioned John Wick in a previous blog about motivations, and you might recall I used the above picture in that very blog. It's a great picture, is why. Look at it.

I only recently got to watch the third instalment of the series. I have had a chance to consider it, think it through, listen to all three soundtracks a whole bunch, and here I am with opinions.

The first thing you have to respect is the work put in.

Like, I am a fan of those old, dumb action movies wherein you have Steven Seagal walking around like a mummy and occasionally doing little hand-slappy attacks. Wherein you have to cut away every half-second so it looks like he delivers an actual roundhouse kick. That kind of nonsense.

So when you see minute-long shots of Keanu Reeves just putting in the work, close combat stuff, rough work - when you see how much training he has done to make this whole thing look absolutely feasible, even as it becomes less and less so as the trilogy continues - you have to respect that. The stunt work, the attention to detail. He's renowned for doing that, for applying himself. The other actors that appear alongside him, fighting him, they deserve that respect too. Ruby Rose, Common, Halle Berry, Mark Dacascos. Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman, from the Raid movies. They put in WORK, and it shows on the screen.

The screen. Yeah, let's talk about cinematography.

Sometimes this trilogy is painfully ugly, deliberately so. It's warehouses, back alleys, trashy clubs. Sometimes, it is beautiful - art galleries, the grounds of a villa, various sites throughout New York City, a souk in Casablanca. One thing it is not is easily forgettable. What are you watching a movie for? Why isn't it a book? So you can watch it. So you can see it. There isn't a single shot in this -

Wait, that's a lie. There is one single shot in this trilogy that I dislike. I'm not going to show it to you. Just pay attention to the bit at the fountain with Wick and Cassian when he gets back to New York in Chapter 2. You'll see what I mean. I have no idea why it is there. One shot, perhaps two seconds long if that. I digress.

How it looks is important, because how it looks is telling you the story within the story. And yeah, there is one. Action movies don't have to be what they used to be. They don't have to be a bunch of goons with muscles and two outdated racial stereotypes shouting at each other until everyone but Arnie is dead.

The story isn't necessarily complex. The imagery is, though. The thematic. What the movie is about, as well as a man being the living embodiment of muder-death-kill.

Allow me to elaborate.

John Wick was a monster who stopped being a monster, and then the things that stopped him being a monster were taken away, one after the other, until he became a monster again. John Wick has no brakes. Those brakes were killed by 1) illness, 2) Alfie FUCKING Allen, and 3) the devil (his name is Santino, look at him).

This trilogy is a lethal exploration of what happens when two forces - the entire criminal underworld and one really angry Keanu Reeves - could back down, at any time, but don't. They literally do it to themselves, and they keep on doing it to themselves. At any point during this journey, one side or other - Viggo, Santino, the High Table - could have downed tools and said: Okay, enough. At any point, John could have put his gun down and gone to live somewhere in the country. Neither of them backed down or gave way, and so, the bodies just kept on stacking.

Time and again, the mythological nature of the entire concept comes up. In the first movie it begins with just a reputation, which steadily becomes proven to be 100% legitimate - but still within believable human boundaries. Boundaries that get stretched with each instalment. As John passes through purgatory, goes through the long walk across the desert and has his heart measured and has to give up everything he loves, as John has to fight through reflections of his own soul to reach the devil, as he has to trade trinkets for passage across the river. As John is tested by emperors and gods and kings and comes away bloodied but alive every time. As he begins the first movie falling out of an SUV half-dead, and ends having survived almost insurmountable odds and yet somehow, still in one piece.

It's a myth.

It's Ajax and Achilles. It's the Green Knight and Sir Lancelot.

So consider that a ringing endorsement.

Maybe skip it if you can't stand to see animals getting hurt - at least, skip the scene in the first one. (Weirdly enough outside of that, great pains are taken throughout the rest of the trilogy to prevent harm to any of the other animals present. This is especially obvious in the third one. I'm a fan.)

Maybe, also, skip it if you're not a fan of action movies - but then I doubt you needed me to tell you that.

Otherwise, get all three of them for a weekend and buckle up.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Causality

This painting is called The Massacre Of The Innocents, by Léon Cogniet.

It was painted in 1824, and it depicts Chapter 2, Verse 16-18 of the Gospel of Matthew. King Herod - yes, that King Herod - realises that he hasn't been told where the new king has been born, and thus, decides to take the broad-strokes approach; he has every single child below the age of two in the vicinity of Bethlehem killed.

(Jesus, at this point, has been whisked off to Egypt at the urging of an angel.)

It bears mention that there is historically little evidence that this actually happened, and that none of the other Gospels even mention it - some suspect that Matthew was basically just borrowing from Exodus and the Pharaoh's ordered execution of Hebrew children.

That isn't to say that Herod wasn't an absolute asshole when it came down to murder and carnage - after all if historical record is anything to go off he apparently killed three of his own sons and one of his wives.

None of that is really the point, though.

You can't see any soldiers, in the painting. You can't see the people actually prosecuting the massacre. All you can see is - in the left third - people running for their lives, and a mother holding her child, eyes wild with fear and anger and determination.

Take a closer look.

Now you can say what you want about the Mona Lisa but when I look at it, I feel nothing. Nothing at all. I have never seen a face so carefully and measurably bland, so determined to be feeling or expressing nothing whatsoever, aside from maybe slight smugness.

This woman - this nameless woman with her child - makes me feel something.

Do any of them - the woman, her child, the fleeing people - know why they are being put to sword? Do any of them know why the soldiers have come to their town, know why they are having to run for their lives? If they do know, does it change anything?

Some people believe in fate, or destiny. Some people believe that everything happens for a reason.

I don't believe in any of those things; I believe in causality, wherein one thing leads to another.

This woman, clutching her child and looking for a way to escape the doom coming for them, is the latest in a long sequence of events, most of which could have easily been prevented or avoided or just not undertaken at all.

Of course the story from Matthew is fiction, and involves supernatural powers. None of it needed to happen whatsoever. The Magi - rather than listening to an angel and just not going back to Herod - could have gone back to him and lied, told him the child died in childbirth. The angel could have gone to Herod and told him to please not do a massacre today. God could have just smashed Herod into a million pieces.

In the real world, things are a bit different, but the concept remains the same.

I am very fortunate to have never had to experience this - to have never been in a position where I had to flee for my life. My family, though? My family on my father's side literally had to survive a war zone. There are more Lebanese folks in Brazil then there are in the Lebanon, and this exodus, this diaspora, featured hundreds of thousands of moments just like this painting - because of the wars brought into their lands by other people, decisions made by other polities, attitudes forged by decades if not centuries of ill will and hatred.

Nobody becomes a refugee because they want to.

The word "refugee" literally means "someone seeking refuge". Someone fleeing from somewhere unsafe. We humans have made a great many places unsafe, and almost all of that has happened because someone, somewhere, made a policy decision.

Fires, droughts, natural disasters. Scientists warned decision-makers, decision-makers listened to other people instead. Decisions got made. Awful things happened. People ran for their lives, and are still running for their lives. Countries and land masses burning or melting.

Despite World War One being "the war to end all wars" we have pretty much been at war continuously since then. Someone makes the decision to shoot where previously there was no shooting. Someone makes the decision to drop the bombs. The bombs fall. People run for their lives, and are still running for their lives. They flee to places that aren't burning or melting or being bombed, and those places...

...well, a lot of those places made money making sure their home got burned or melted or bombed - and is relying on a percentage of their citizens to hate outsiders enough to overwhelm their sympathy or pity for those fleeing destruction. No room here. No space here. No resources here. Plenty of resources for bombs and drills, none for people.

These things don't happen just because. They don't fall out of heaven, proclaimed by angels. They aren't fated, they aren't destined.

They happen because people make decisions.

We owe it to the entire world, let alone ourselves, to do what we can to stop those decisions leading to the massacre of innocents.

I don't have the answers as to how we do that. I'm just a blogger. What I do know is that it starts with a recognition as to where this starts; what follows is the will to make it change.

If you need to - look at her face again.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

It Means Workhorse

So I really enjoyed The Mandalorian, but it isn't my favourite scifi TV series of the past few years.

I mean in terms of actual sheer quality, the best TV show I can remember is actually Chernobyl. It was mindblowing. I will also never let go of the candles I hold for Firefly and MST3K.

The best series I watched this year, though?

Well, that would be The Expanse.

Based on a series of books by James S. A. Corey - 8 books out so far with various supplemental novellas and shorts, the 9th and final book coming out TBA 2020 - the TV series was always going to have a hard time actually capturing the characters that the books so masterfully brought into existence.

It isn't just the characters, of course. The actual scifi elements of it - the ship design, the way the physics works, the way society and politics have arranged themselves in this future that Corey has imagined - masterful. Everything from the cultural boundaries between the Earth folks, the Martians and the Belters, even down to their language and accents and their attitude to life in general. How conflict in space is handled, in the most reasonable and common-sense way I can imagine - almost always conducted at long range with torpedoes and point-defence countermeasures, with occasional need for railguns.

It's the characters I come back for, though.

Like this guy. Jim Holden.

Yes, I know he looks a bit like Jon Snow, and yes, I know a random white guy with facial hair is a boring main character, but hear me out:

Jim Holden is fantastic.

In a show about all of the choices having potential costs and consequences and the politics of situations making no-win scenarios increasingly likely, the best arc you can see is a man who is determined to do the right thing, or the best thing, or - hopefully - both.

In a world full of grit and shades-of-grey and meaningful sideways looks, to have a protagonist that you can trust to just do the right thing and tilt at the windmills that need tilting at, even if he thinks he will lose... that's valuable.

(That's why the ship is named the Rocinante, by the way. Well, that and because Amos liked it because he knew someone called that once. It means workhorse.)

But of course a man needs a crew, and that crew needs a technician, and thus you have Naomi Nagata.

Now Jim is from Earth, the son of a collective family of seven parents; Naomi is from the Belt. She spent her entire life in the void, and doesn't trust planets. "Nothing to hold the sky in, it's weird," she says at least once.

Naomi is brilliant. Literally a genius. Fearless, too, but rarely will she conflate that lack of fear with foolishness. She is Jim's externalised common sense. She knows the systems of the Roci like she knows the back of her hand, better probably, and she's never afraid to put her foot down if necessary.

And boy does she love Jim. And he loves her. And when you watch the series, it will make sense as to why. Suffice to say there's some actual development rather than "because the scriptwriters said so".

Every good crew needs a pilot. You could do a lot worse than Alex Kamal.

Martian by birth, Alex speaks with an affected Texan drawl, because everyone from that bit of Mars tends to. Yes, it's odd, but it's also now an indelible part of their culture - as is the pride of adapting and overcoming a hostile environment. He's ex-military (so is Jim), and that shows, at times.

He's a lovable guy. Like, you can't help but like Alex. He's a great dude. He's made his mistakes, of course, and he'll be the first to admit it - part of his draw. He's under precious little illusions as to how life works and his place in it. When it comes down to it, though, he's reliable and trustworthy, and the Rocinante couldn't ask for a better pilot.

And then there's this guy.

Amos Burton, who puts bits of the ship back together that break, and breaks people that need breaking.

He's a lot of people's favourite. He's from a difficult and somewhat shrouded past, which has left him with an abiding need to protect and look after kids, an amiable smile that sits on his face almost all the time, and a hair-trigger willingness to kill you with his bare hands if you need killed.

His favourite technique appears to be to snap you in half backwards over a table.

Seriously though - Amos is immune to bullshit, incapable of lying, and as long as you're doing the right or the smart thing, you want this man at your back. He's the most dependable man in the galaxy.

He'd so easily be my favourite, were it not for the existence of...

Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper.

Power armoured Martian marine badass. There is nothing not to love. Her approach to problems is direct but she is far from stupid. She takes pride in who she is and what she does, and she does it better than anyone else. I love Bobbie.

Like yeah, the show has a lot of asses that need kicked, and Bobbie is capable of doling out most of those. Her and Amos together are a fearsome combination.

And that's just... like, five of the characters. Perhaps the main five.

I haven't even talked about Miller, the detective who looks how I feel, who wears a hat in an orbital habitat to "keep the rain off". Chrisjen Avasarala, the politician, who is definitely not a protagonist but you definitely kind of want her to win anyway. Camina Drummer and Klaes Ashford. Shed. Murtry. Praxideke Meng. The Mao family. Elvi Okoye. There's just so much good character here that you love seeing them being on the screen, let alone reading them on the page.

I am evangelical about this show. Perhaps that is why I like it more. Like, The Mandalorian is good, but it doesn't need me to talk about it. It doesn't have hidden depths, it is what you think it is. The Expanse has so much more to it than any trailer can prepare you for.

Watch it.

Make it your 2020 New Year Resolution.

Watch it, read it, catch the last book.

You will thank me later.

Might do a blog on New Year's Eve, might not. If not - happy new year.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Whamhalla Awaits

Can you hear this picture?

Yeeeesss.

Now as it is a certain time of year I bet a fair few of you have heard this song. Recently even. I bet that at least one of you have heard it today, even.

There is a certain amount of creep, when it comes to Christmas. It somewhat feels like the Christmas-branded guff comes out earlier and earlier every year, and the eagerness for people to start being their happy little elf-selves is palpable by the beginning of October. I've personally always held to the Halloween rule - after that, do what you want, the big holiday of the year is already over.

There is also a common link between how early Christmas decorations start being put up and generalised depression within a community, but yanno.

Perhaps a more visceral indication of the oncoming festivities is when the music starts playing on the radio and such - the first creeping out of your Wizzards and your Pogues and your Slades and such. Then you have your songs that have the word "Christmas" in them so they are automatically Christmassy, and songs that have bells in them so they are also Christmassy for no apperent reason, like East 17.

And then you have this little yuletide ditty, too - this little tune by pop lads Wham, from back in 1984. Last Christmas. A song and a video in combination that tell us of a man who is terrified of being alone but also can't let go of the girl that apparently randomly seduced him the Christmas before and then dumped him immediately.

The video doesn't seem to convey this angle. It more seems to be that the band and their friends all hang out in a ski lodge over Christmas, and that Andrew Ridgeley is now going out with George Michael's ex, but they still all hang out together anyway, a situation I would literally shoot myself in the foot to not have to deal with.

How do you deal with the unavoidable, inexorable Christmas creep? (No, not that guy in the office that you really should report to HR.)

You turn it into a game, of course.

Whamageddon. It's been running for years, now - the rules have been formalised. It begins at midnight, at the very beginning of December, and the goal is to make it to midnight Christmas Eve without hearing Last Christmas by Wham. If you hear it, and you recognise it, you have to declare it. You're out of the game, and consigned to Whamhalla. If you make it? You have achieved glory - feel free to blast the tune first thing on Christmas morning to celebrate (and wake up your neighbours).

Covers are okay. Remixes are okay. They aren't the original song, so by definition, they don't count. A lot of folks who like this song but play Whamageddon anyhow stave off  "Wham Cravings" by this method. It isn't illegal to sabotage your friends - adding it to a community playlist, sneaking it into the youtube queue at a party, literally walking up to people while playing it on your phone - but it is considered a serious breach of etiquette and a total dick move.

I lost Whamageddon this year at the work Christmas party, which is probably true for most people. I was out early. I don't know if anyone else that I know is still in, at this point. Maybe. We live in hope.

It's this kind of little game - this constant social game that other people know about and participate in - that can make life a little better. Like injokes with your friends (37!), or like The Game (which you just lost), or THIS nonsense, before insecure racists turned it into their little feel-better symbol (assholes).

I hope you have your own little games to play this Christmas - your own little things to do, ways to stay sane.

Look after yourselves.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Putting Down A Marker

This will, in all likelihood, be the last post I make about British politics for a long time, if only because I simply don't have the heart for it any more.

So rather than look back at the events of 12th December 2019, I will instead present predictions for us as a nation moving forward.

Things will begin to get worse for, well, normal people. People like you and me. People that need prescription medication. People that use public transport. People that rent places to live.

It won't become a lot worse, all at once; but over the next few years, prices will increase with no commensurate increase in pay. Likewise, services will degrade, with no commensurate decrease in cost.

Taxes for the wealthy will be reduced. Taxes for corporations will be reduced. The savings will not be passed down to their employees.

Homelessness statistics will increase. If enough people notice and object, perhaps the definition will be changed, showing a sudden dramatic decrease in those that tick the "Homeless" box on a spreadsheet. Likewise, poverty - more people will slip below the poverty line until the line is redrawn.

Support will be cut for the vulnerable, resulting in an increased mortality in those specific sectors.

Another tower block may burn down due to having cheaper cladding, deaths perhaps reaching triple figures. Parallels will be drawn. Nothing will come of it.

There will not be fifty thousand more nurses. There will not be twenty thousand more police officers.

Hate crimes will increase. There will be less recourse for those who are victims of aforementioned crimes.

The economy will suffer. The stock market will not. Our national debt will continue increasing, despite the cuts in public spending.

There will be talk of a skills gap. News reports about a lack of people being trained to cover shortfalls in necessary services. This will be waved away as scaremongering, before the service is handed off to a private contractor.

Throughout all of this, there will be precious little protest. There will be no general strike. There may be an attempt but it will come to nothing. If a protest does happen, it will be heavily covered by half of the media outlets in this country and denigrated by the rest, and then forgotten about a week later.

There will be calls for us to put our differences aside and help people, because that is what will be needed, now. Not recriminations - support.

There will be those who are confused as to why others they know are willing to part from friends over their voting choices. There will be those who respond with vitriol because those voting choices have negatively impacted their lives.

There will be calls to change the system of voting. They will gain little traction, simply due to apathy. Statistics won't make much of a dent in this apathy.

Then Brexit will happen, and that is where my speculation will come to an end.

I hope - I truly hope - that I am wrong.

I hope that none of this comes to pass. I hope that everything is just fine, and that the hits to the country that we've suffered since 2010 are as bad as it gets. I hope that everything from here on in is up-and-up.

In a long while, I will look back, and I will see if any of this turned out to be true.

For now, though, I'm taking a big step back from following politics.

I just don't have it in me.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.