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1. Sunset/Sunrise/Midnight trilogy. Mannahnin already covered these well, and you have to be in the mood for an intimate character study, but these are, to my mind, basically perfect films. The only other trilogy I could say that about is... 2. Toy Story 1-3. There is not a wasted frame in any...

Just finished this. I liked it quite a lot, though maybe not as much as the first season, which had a more complete arc. A lot of fun moments (my favourite was toxic masculinity), and Cena is used incredibly well. My absolute highlight was Adebayo and her wife realizing that they couldn't be...

I agree. It's usually when people have time to be ideological that they get terrible, at least at a systematic level.

My most perfect trilogy, in terms of having almost no notes, is Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight. I'll have to think about the others.

I'm pretty sure we're still on 5e because I updated the books on DDB without telling my players (who don't care about such things) and most never noticed, aside from having a few new character options (which some still haven't bothered with). If folks are calling games like Level Up 5e, then it...

If a player wants to work diabetes management into their character, I'm definitely not going to tell them "no, a cleric or paladin just cures it." I'm presuming that this is important to them - maybe they manage it IRL and want to bring that experience into their fantasy world. For example, I...

I'm reevaluating my Star Wars is fantasy/western in sci-fi drag thesis. In terms of story and themes, I'll stand by that assertion all day long. But, given that this is a film discussion, I should be giving more weight to the look and sound of the movie. So I asked myself, "given that SW is a...

For me, 5e felt like a very comfortable return to D&D for someone who played the heck out of 1e, played a little 2e here and there, and dabbled in 3e. I basically took 4e off - it feels like the outlier, to me. For some folks in a good way, and it has a lot to recommend, but it wasn't my jam and...

And lair actions.

I debated Alien because horror is its first genre, but it definitely falls into the speculative fiction category, as well, in ways that Star Wars does not. The genre distinction is important for me because, for me, sci-fi and fantasy are very different experiences. Sci-fi wants to make you...

I've just started Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. I normally love his books, but the premise of this one just didn't grab me, and it's a bit of a beast. However, I've read everything else he's published and this was on for like 3 bucks or something on Kindle, so I figured I should check it off the...

My top 5: 1. Alien 2. Bladerunner 3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 4. Children of Men 5. The Iron Giant

Agreed. Star Wars (Andor possibly excepted) is far more fantasy in terms of both content and, especially, themes and narrative structure, than it is sci-fi. Probably more Western, as well. I would call it a Fantasy Western with a sci-fi aesthetic.

Of course it's imprecise. That's a feature, not a flaw: it's a broad term within which various sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories, etc. are subsumed. That's just...how language works. We understand, for example, that the word "sports" denotes certain very general features, while "baseball"...

I run my campaign worlds like I see the real world: people are complicated, so are their social systems, and sometimes they do bad things. If history has shown us anything, it's that people can do terrible things even with supposedly good intentions. Often because of supposedly good intentions...

Drinking rum. Edit: my campaign kicked off one game where the party had to rescue the captain's rum from some harpies.

Agreed - superheroes are typically extreme deontologists, concerned with the moral principle, not loosey-goosey consequentialists who focus on the greater good. Refusing to sacrifice any baby, not just their own, is extremely on brand for the FF.

You mean they're checking their DMs when they shoud be paying attention to the game, so I kill their character with a lightning bolt?

I saw it at a drive-in in Langley.

I find those AI responses interesting, because LLMs are essentially aggregators of the most typical responses, which makes them kind of useless for generating anything original, but potentially useful if you want a kind of "wisdom of crowds" response...which is arguably particularly relevant for...