Joe Walsh

Marlon Wayans Presents The Headliners (HBOMax): This one-hour comedy show presents five standup comedians and gives each the time for a short set. The laffs vary, of course, but four of the five had me wanting more. Worth a watch.

Just finished The Batman, and I am so disappointed. The movie was a series of slowly acted and spoken scenes punctuated by unremarkable action sequences. A sophomoric effort, especially the catwoman relationship that came out of nowhere and went nowhere. Oh, well. A new Batman will be along in a few years.

I submitted this as an issue in the store. Hopefully it will come to the right person's attention that way.

That would make sense! Should be an easy fix. 🤞

Thanks! I'd rather pay Hero Games directly, but that's a solid backup plan if they truly aren't selling it here anymore for some reason.

The 4e Primus PDF is listed in the store as being out of stock. Is that correct and it's not sold any more, or is it a bug?

That makes sense. I only support a few Patreons and never noticed that.

We watched the first two episodes of a couple of new-to-us series on HBOMax: Minx: This half-hour comedy set in the early 70s is about a young woman who realizes her dream of publishing a feminist magazine...thanks to a porn magazine publisher and his crew. So far, it's been really funny and all the characters are nuanced and not simple caricatures. Our Flag Means Death: This half-hour comedy set aboard a would-be pirate ship isn't as funny as Minx, but it's been good enough so far. The 2nd episode was better than the first. It gets its comedy from the ship captain and owner being a fop, while the crew of bloodthirsty pirates are, at best, third-rate mates. Heavy use of all the usual pirate tropes, with a bit of subversion here and there. We start on season 2 of The Flight Attendant tonight, and then it won't be but a week until season 2 of Made for Love. HBOMax is inundating me with new seasons of old favorites this month!

I don't know the details of how Patreon works, so I'm curious why with 29 members, there's only $121/month instead of $145. Do people who support lots of different Patreons get a volume discount or something?

That, and the counties where property taxes will massively increase as a result of this are both majority Dem, so from the legislature's perspective no loss if those residents get pissed off (including the R's living there of course). From DeSantis' perspective, this is all just paving his way to the White House, so it sort of doesn't matter what happens to Florida, as long as it makes him look good in the eyes of R megadonors and the true believers.

I've been enjoying Moon Knight so far, but to me episode 4 was significantly better. The first three episodes were fun, but episode four was compelling.

Wonderful!! Well worth the risk of revealing my secret identity.

Did I miss the launch of the Patreon?

For the first time in my life, I watched Network (1976) (HBOMax). I'd seen parts of it before, but never the whole thing. It was amazingly prescient, and it still holds up pretty well. It was also a good reminder that a lot of our current problems don't date back just to the legitimization of greed in the 80s, but to well before that.

I've never done it, but I've been told that to get a good scan of a hardcover or perfectbound book, you have to cut the pages from the binding.

I'd hate to sacrifice one of my precious paper copies (or yours!), but if we had to... Of course, there are the scan-to-PDF copies that HERO Games sells, which I have thanks to their deal with Bundle of Holding a while back. I'm not sure how useful they are given the way text is treated in PDF scans that have been OCR'd -- every line ends in a line feed, nothing's treated as a paragraph, etc. Or maybe that doesn't matter? My ignorance on layout software is Grand Canyon sized unfortunately.

We watched the documentary "Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off" (2022) which was not only about the titular subject, but also the famous Bones Brigade skate group and how those crazy kids are doing now that they're grandfathers (or at least old enough to be). At more than 2 hours long, it needed to be pretty compelling for someone like me, who was only tangentially aware of the skate phenomenon the few times its become megapopular over the last 50 years. And I think the documentary succeeds in that. I enjoyed watching the whole thing. Check it out if you're at all interested (on HBOMax).

Revisionaries author A.R. Moxon just published the fourth part of a series of essays on how to change the underlying ideas of society. That is, how to change what's deemed possible within the society (for good or ill). It's about how successful movements get things changed -- and how entrenched interests keep any discussion of real change out of polite conversation. Really good stuff. Here's a link to part one, which has links to the other three parts: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/juliusgoat/issues/one-about-the-atmosphere-1037410

Exactly. By saying an organization with an even split of R and D leaders is biased against them, they're 1) saying they will only support things that are biased in their favor and 2) sending yet another signal to their base that democracy is biased against them and must be rejected.

That's probably the only way it would ever happen -- unless we somehow coalesce and "crowd fund" it ourselves. Definitely. Oooh. That would be very nice to have! Failing that, I have the old Hero Plus Rulesbook PDF. It has its own set of errors apart from those in the published versions, and the image scans are very low res (understandable for the time). Not sure if it would make a helpful starting point, or if re-entering the text and tables from scratch would be easier than starting from that old PDF.

Forgot to mention that we finished S2 of How To with John Wilson (HBOMax), an odd little comedy documentary series that we've found to be pretty compelling. He manages to find the most surprising stuff, and to weave it together in wonderful ways. Heck, just the little bits of footage he shoots and stitches together for use during his voiceovers is often surprising and funny. The way he assembles his footage brings to mind how a poet assembles their words.

We watched the first two episodes of My Brilliant Friend on HBOMax. It's an Italian series about two schoolgirls in the 1950s, their frenemyship, and the community they live in. It's very well done, and if it was a 2-hour movie we'd probably rate it highly, but watching season after season of desperate people behaving terribly isn't really something we want to do. On the other hand, Starstruck S2 (also on HBOMax) is going great, two episodes in! And the first four episodes of Cake S4 (Hulu) have been better than seasons 2 or 3.

Thank you! That gives us a start. The 4e BBB has a total of 352 pages with ink on 'em, so if we assume $5/page that's $1760 for layout. Call it $2k. Very doable so far! And theoretical projects for2e Champions, Espionage!, 3e Champions, Danger International, Justice Inc., etc would be even more affordable on a per-project basis, assuming there would be demand for new prints of any of them. I wonder how much data entry and copy editing would cost per page. 🤔 Back in the 90s, we were paid a pittance for writing supplements for Marc Miller's Traveller, and I gather that hasn't changed much in the intervening time. I wonder if copy editing has become better paid now.

I use it, but not when introducing new players to the system. A scratch sheet is used for keeping track of END. No house rules.