Vondy

I am finishing up a second BA and getting ready to apply to doctoral programs. If anyone wants to know why our society is growing so vacuous and trite, the non-degree core course requirements at universities are increasingly filled with counter-intellectual and empirically disreputable ideological bullshit. Indoctrination is not education. And, while many degrees have serious core classes, others allow core requirements to be filled with classes that are nonsensical and perilously idiotic at best. This is especially true at the undergraduate level, which is as far as most university "educated" people ever go. Most of these oddball courses are taught by "academics" who seem to believe repeating utter (and often offensive) nonsense with a straight face and moralizing tenor makes it true rather than deeply ironic. Its not that our educated elites have failed. Its that they are AWOL from all but the most advanced, specialized, and serious of courses.

A psychology graduate department head: "The state licensing requirements produce a faceless army of soulless government approved clinicians and all of the local doctoral programs are tailored to that artless institutionalized aim. If you want to study depth psychology or psychodymic therapy, which I applaud, you are in a no man's land. We may have some of the strictest licensing requirements in the country, but that doesn't amount to clinicians who can relate to their patients. They are all being taught that their patients are research subjects, statistics, and margins of outcome. There is more to psychology than data and numbers. It would surprise many of my colleagues to learn our work involves people."

The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell. Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung. The Happiness Hypothesis, Johnathan Haidt.

I was five years old when the first Star Wars film came out. I grew up Star Wars, which was the first mythic cycle that filled my imagination and informed my psyche. For me Star Wars begins and ends with Luke Skywalker. His story began in A New Hope and ended in The Last Jedi. His tale, and the essential mythic cycle of Star Wars, is now complete. The epic circle is closed and everything else is footnotes and commentary. Rey is a great character and worthy successor and Daisy Ridley is well cast. I like her. But her tale is not my tale. Its not Luke's tale. Disney's cash-cow adventures add nothing to the archetypal core at the heart of Star Wars. Neither did the prequels, really. Those are to Star Wars as the Silmarillion is to The Lord of the Rings. Interesting as apocrypha, but essentially superfluous. My Star Wars is done. It came and went with Luke. There comes a time when we must put childish things aside. Not because they aren't important, and not because they did not (and do not) inform key aspects of who we are, but because we are now adults. May Luke be with you, always.

Martial arts in Hero are are really shorthand for powers, skill levels, and modified strength. So...how about a Variable Power-Pool? 20 points should be able to model almost any book maneuver. Just add the limitation "only to model martial arts effects." Or... a power pool "only for heroic skills and talents." Then, grab whatever heroic combat talent is appropriate from the Dark Champions or Hero System Martial Arts books.

I'm going to disagree about his powers being boring and say that its not the powers that make a super-hero interesting. I thought the way they worked the super-serum into the kitchy pseudo-african culture and made it a part of the land he rules (the king and the land are one) to be at least archetypal. And his suit is boiler-plate, though adding the kinetic absorption and release was kind of cool. My issue is that I found T'Challa boring not as a super-hero, but as a person. He is a staunch conservative, monarchist, and traditionalist. And, while he's willing to open a center outside of Wakanda by the end of the film, his realm remains essentially closed-off and isolationist in character. The actor is very talented, but the character is overly stoic. He makes solemnizing speeches, and and is admirably resolute, but he's not vibrant. I like a man of and for his people, but as presented he's not a very evocative figure. He doesn't inspire. He's everybody else's straight man and sounding board. The people around him bring the key notes to the scenes. I don't blame the actor. I blame the writers. They could have done a great deal to make him inspiring, innovative, or even humanized him with some wry humor of his own. Chadwik Boseman was not given as rich a script or as developed a character as Chris Evans. I also found the depiction of Wakanda banal and tone-deaf. Americans tend to have atavistic, idealistic, ignorant, and unrealistic ideas about "ancestral homelands" they are generations removed from and have little, if any, direct experience of. I am not sure, if I were African, I would appreciate this presentation of "Africa" no matter what color the skin of the writers and directors happen to be. Its a fallacy rooted in our love of hyphenating ourselves. We appropriate and misrepresent cultures that haven't really been our own for generations. If a German American makes a film about Germany filled with lederhosen, oompa bands, giant beer steins, humorless engineers, and gourmet sausages we all know its ridiculous and a bit offensive to real Germans. I didn't see the Black Panther as being any different: an bizarre fantasy Africa produced by a hyphenated American. Knowing where your people are from does not make you from that place or give you a critical pass when you to rip it out of its accurate and authentic ethnographic context to produce an emotionally convenient caricature of a culture that serves your wholly unrelated social and cultural circumstances and aims (even if those aims are, in of themselves, admirable). You can choose to do that. What you can't do is demand someone regard it as worthwhile art. My people primarily come from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Germany. That does not mean I can create bad caricatures of those countries and cultures and expect accolades for the final product just because happen to slap Irish-Scottish-Welsh-German on the left of my -American. Unless I'm writing a comedy and seeking to lampoon the stereotypes, I'm pretty much saying "hey, look at me, I'm an offensive American ignoramous!" I really wanted to like this movie, but overall, I found it groan-worthy.

I agree overall. To be fair, there are some American shows that make an effort to do better. They aren't the majority, but every so often I run across something that doesn't scream "written by boorishly didactic idiots." Less so the mainstream news....

I'll be honest and say I've mostly stopped watching marvel movies. In fact, I've seriously curtailed the amount of American media I consume at all. This is not because Marvel is making bad movies. The production values, cinematography, acting, and set-piece scenes are top notch. The movies are, overall, fun. Rather, its because Marvel, like most American media these days, has fully embraced the obnoxious trend of ideological didacticism. I believe this devalues art. Art is cultural product and politics is downstream from culture. I'm an art and culture snob in the sense that I consider our political class unwashed barbarians. They have no business interfering with art. When you politicize art it becomes rank propaganda and loses its intended impact. When you attempt to legislate culture it ceases to be haute or lowbrow (I enjoy both). Rather, It becomes an oppressive and farcical caricature of culture. It is also, quite frankly, tonally dissonant and off-putting. You can address serious social issues in cinema in an intelligent, nuanced, provoking way without resorting to sophomoric binary framing of issues and soap-box lectures. One of the most counter-productive ways to address a social issue is preaching. Art doesn't tell its audience what to think. Art merely provokes rather than informs reaction. The writers at Marvel are becoming increasingly didactic. Part of the problem is that I have been consuming a lot of cinema and television from around the world. I'm not consuming in an Anglo bubble. One show I watched recently was the Spanish crime drama Mar Del Plastico. Now, it is a Spanish show. These cops have no business looking this good. These cops have way more sex while doing their jobs than is quite right. And, MARIA! There is melodrama ramped up to 11. Yet, this show tackles refugees and racism in Spain today in a far more intelligent, nuanced, and story-driven way the propagandists masquerading as script-writers in the US do today (I'm looking at you SWAT!). None of the characters stop and tell you what you should think and feel about an issue. You are confronted with characters on both sides and forced to react. Deadpool 2 was an exception that consciously called the trend out and played with it, but it will not stop the tide. And, 20 movies in, I'm looking for something other than superheroes, anyways. Variety is the spice of life. Heresy on the Hero Boards, I know! Again, I am not saying Marvel is making bad movies or that being more inclusive is bad. I'm 100% for more women and minority heroes on screen insofar as its done well and doesn't undermine its goal in the first place. And, even the bad Marvel movies are top shelf in a technical sense. But, as someone who loves comics as a form of literature and art, I will say the trend is that Marvel is now producing movies that - while spectacular in the literal sense - are neither literary nor artistic. Finito and Excelsior!

Agreed. We went and saw this one last week. It was a laugh-riot.

Sadly, I'm on the wrong side of the water. Kitsap.

Titling this "complaint box" poisons the well of discussion from the outset. I will pass on participation beyond saying "haters gonna hate."

I've used Occulon and Viper-X to great effect. I even managed to turn Occulon into "not a chump." I did use Viperia in one scenario. She was, of course, scary. The heroes had to out-think her on the battlefield and had to focus on their mission objective rather than just beating her. Overall, I felt she was overpowered and that her powers were slapped on "just because" She was a little to narrow for me, personally, to use over the long-haul. She was more of a "doomsday weapon" than a well-rounded character.

Gnomes are Halflings who talk to badgers, squirrels, and such-like. In our games Gnomes and Halflings have been replaced by 3-foot tall Elves known simply as "smallfolk." There are no D&D or Tolkein styled Elves.

Hippy-dippy boomer woo-woo utopian pipe dreams has never done much for me. Oddly, the boomers who produced TOS created a show that was less of that than this one is claiming to be. I have seen every episode of trek prior to this series, but will happily skip this one. We've had 28 seasons of Trek prior to this, not including TAS. The only way we'd ever need more would be if it were actually good. The only new Trek I'm interested in at this stage is the reboot films

If you are running a multi-generational campaign that spans a significant period of time, then advancing the technological timeline makes sense. If you are running a game that covers a specific set of characters careers, then it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to have many technological advances. You could showcase one or two important things during that period - the novel invention, as it were - and make it a plot related thing, of course. I guess you could have magic progress like high-tech and move at a breakneck pace the way our generation has seen it move. But, for most of human history, that was not the case. Our perspective of fast-paced technological change is actually highly unusual. But, overall, I prefer my fantasy games have a more discrete time scale - and approach them the way REH did the Conan. The chronicler was telling tales about the life and times of a legendary king, conan, so it didn't matter how there were - they all fall within one man's lifetime. I like to tell stories about characters and their careers, not about worlds. This may just be because I'm not a Tolkein fan. He was a far better world builder than storyteller. For me, unless the technological change is relevant to the plot I'm not going to be much inspired by it because its change for its own sake and not even about the characters.

I was recently told I'm "pithy." I was initially offended, but then looked it up. I am pithy. Even when you possess a vast and rococo vocabulary there are words you need to learn.

There's theory and there is practice. In theory, you could make that argument. In practice, the legal bar for getting a sentence overturned as "unfair" in America is almost impossible meet. The simple fact is, American judicial culture is steeped in judges preserving the authority of other judges. And, what is more, even if you could meet the bar, that will cost more in attorneys fees than most upper middle class households could underwrite, let alone a poor person who received a ridiculous sentence because he couldn't afford those fees the first time around. You have to buy justice in this country and it doesn't come cheap. Without a brilliant do-gooding altruist willing do do hundreds of thousands of dollars of pro bono legal work pro bono over several years to appeal the case, potentially all the way to SCOTUS - or a pardon from the governor of his state - the poor guy has zero chance. Even then his odds are slim. There is a reason billionaires do forty months for stealing billions and hiding behind lawyers while poor people do fifteen years for remorsefully admitting they took a Franklin. America doesn't have a justice system and its not interested in mercy or proportion vis-a-vis the crimes people commit. It has a class-biased punishment system whose main aim is to throw away the key and forget anyone who can't buy their freedom.

Agreed.

Gaming-wise: Cyberpunk 2020, Jovian Chronicles, and Transhuman Space are all "fairly hard." I've enjoyed games inspired by them.

Wouldn't this just be deflect?

Oddly, I live in a Navy Town. There is a preponderance of barbershops and tattoo parlors. However, those certain types of clubs and massage establishments are not to be found. This is because the Navy has pushed not to have them here! You actually have to cross the sound and go into the big bad city an hour away to find those dens of iniquity.

In harn there is a port city that has a lot of sailors and trade where the wharf district is called "the alienage." It's a separate walled-gated area connected to the main city. In my games, larger settlements tend not to have separate walled areas, but taverns, gambling dens, inns... er, establishments... and supply shops that cater to adventurers tend to be clustered around the main gates, or in villages outside the gates. I guess you could call them a combination of "alienage" and "red light district."

Welcome to America. Hang 'em high unless they've got money. Fat cats get a pass.

I was born and raised in America, but find I feel like a stranger in a strange land these days. Ancestral roots dating back to the 1630s does not a home make. Five year plan: Rehovot or bust. It's time for a second go.