Tome Waster

It's a film, and a very divisive one at that! If you were in the twitter-sphere when it was released, there were essentially two opinions floating around: wow this is really good this is an immoral, sexist piece of garbage, and you should feel like a mangy dog for having watched it And gee, I dunno. I've watched the movie of course, I've talked to a lot of people about it, and I've read way too many internet hot takes. And I've come to a conclusion. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a very human, very good work of art. And it just so happens to further a thematic argument and a worldview that I pretty much completely disagree with. I don't think that art should be limited to the didactic, I don't think that characters have to be "realistic,"* I don't think that every movie needs a balanced cast in terms of race and gender.** What I want is art that is human, that is unique, that is individual. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood checks all th...

What if we believed that D&D is irredeemably based on a colonialist mindset ?  What if we imposed a leftist gaze on the money-hungry, individualistic framework of OSR rulesets? Kinda like if you based a world on that half a Ursula K. Leguin novel you read 5 years ago, except with orcs. Enter... Time Traveling Cyber Gators Adventurers have plundered our land! They've pillaged dungeons and towns alike, flooded the market with gold, and created massive wealth inequality. Oh yeah, and all hirelings are slaves now. To prevent this awful future from occurring, cyber gator cops from the future have travelled back in time to stop the PCs' rise to despotism. The gators aim to clear out dungeons' wealth and assassinate prominent adventurers. T he PCs, unaware of what atrocities their actions will lead to, will invariably view the gators as enemies. If they by some chance learn more about the gators' purpose, the PCs will have some difficult decisions to make. Do th...

A traveling clock salesman, having found himself lost in a stretch of treacherous woods, is waylaid by bandits. His life and his cash are taken, and the caravan, still full of clocks, is left to rot in the wilderness. A decade passes. The clocks, deprived of their time-telling purpose, are getting bored. False Grandfathers Armor: as Unarmored (as Leather from behind due to lack of delicate glass/machinery to crush) Move: 10’ Hit Dice: 2 1 fall/crush attack: Upon a successful to-hit roll, the victim takes 1d6 damage and must make a successful saving throw versus Paralysis to avoid being pinned under the clock’s weight.  Morale: 8 False grandfathers are sentient clocks fascinated by signs of the repetitive passage of time: running streams, windmills, manual labor, wavering flags, etc. They are curious, peaceful creatures, but if attacked will reciprocate with the full force of their body weight, casually falling backwards onto their attacker. Enterprising ...

I read things and I think things and I feel things, and then since my memory is garbage and nobody reads the same things I do I can't discuss them and I begin to doubt what the fucking point of fiction even is. So, casually, I'm gonna talk about some things I read in the last year that I can remember and that I have opinions on. First up: Dune Messiah So here's the 2nd Dune book. Herbert spent like 10 years writing Dune —that book's like 700 pages, a slow burn, a batshit exercise in world-building and Shakespearean drama, a fictional, internally-consistent space that iteratively opens up and explains itself to the viewer. Then it sold like a zillion copies and Herbert said "word, gimme a couple years, I'mma write a sequel." Okay, that's pretty dismissive. Once you lay the groundwork of a fictional space, you can focus on telling stories in that space, so it makes sense that it would take less long to write further installments. But then again...