Joe Walsh

Kari Lake will be fine, doing the right-wing grievance tour grift forever.

We stopped watching The Patient (Hulu) and The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime) half way through each series. They just weren't holding our interest, and we weren't looking forward to the next episode of either. For us, they were more like the stuff we used to watch back in the bad old days before we had so many great choices. No reason to keep watching something that's not keeping our interest, these days.

My wife and I went on vacation last month. The resort we've been visiting for 15 years has been subjected to so much cost cutting and so many price hikes that it's no longer fun to be there. They can't even handle basic functions like keeping things working or preparing food safely any more. But we realized whereas in years past we would have been effectively stuck there because we would have flown in, this time we'd driven. So we decided to get what we could from the hotel to compensate us for the terrible time we had (which involved food poisoning, backed up drains, and more), and then bug out halfway through our planned vacation. And that's just what we did. We got a voucher for the nights we'd stayed and a refund for the nights we hadn't yet stayed, along with a credit for our food purchases and the like. Then we left. We had a great vacation from that point on! We took a long route home and enjoyed the drive and our time in LA, TX, and OK. It was the best vacation we'd had in years. So we've decided to do more of that in the future. More driving vacations where we spend a little time in a number of new-to-us places, doing new things. It's nice to be excited about our future vacations again.

I know I'm coming to it late, but ST: Lower Decks is the best Star Trek series I've seen in...maybe forever.

Not a bad one in the bunch, IMO. 1. Moon Knight 2. WandaVision 3. Loki 4. She-Hulk 5. Hawkeye 6. Miss Marvel 7. Falcon and the Winter Soldier

That would be such a dream. Getting the most popular core rulebooks for each era back in print would be my dream, as getting the full 6e line back in print would be great for a number of people. But would enough people would be interested in Hero to fund any sort of reprint Kickstarter? Even for something that was nostalgically popular like the 4e BBB? I'd love to find out.

That was it! I hadn't run into the no s-word rule before. 🤷‍♂️

Reboot (Hulu): Basically this is a broadcast network style workplace sitcom, but it's pretty well done. Not too many "pause for laff" points that fall flat. Warewolf by Night (Disney+): Total aces. Fantastic one-shot. No notes. Andor (Disney+): We're only 7 episodes into this one, but so far it's been the best live action Star Wars series. Upload (Amazon Prime): Wow, Amazon actually made a good series! So funny, but such a disturbing future. Sci-fi doing what it does best. Undone (Amazon Prime): Holy smokes, Amazon has two original series not associated with Jeremy Clarkson that are actually worth watching? This one is fun with time travel and metaphysics, and it's rotoscoped...but it's great!

I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks, so maybe I missed an announcement, but when I try to post in the 'What have you watched recently' topic, it tells me I'm posting things that aren't allowed, and asks me to change the highlighted things below...and then it shows me my whole post with every word highlighted. And they're all just mundane entries, with the name of the show, where to watch it, and a pithy statement about the show. No matter what I change, it thinks my whole post is breaking the rules. What can I do?

Sounds like Warner is taking a step in the right direction by putting James Gunn in charge of DC films, movies, and animation. I don't know much about his co-, though (aside from what's in the press release). Is it good that Peter Safran is in charge as well?

I guess it was a good plan to get that out there back in the spring when it was initially leaked.

Looks like the Supreme Court ruling on abortion wasn't the Republican electoral disaster the pundits told us it would be. 😞

She-Hulk: The S1 finale was just wonderful, at least from the perspective of this John Byrne era She-Hulk fan. I loved it and I hope there's a second season someday.

I don't think I've ever hated an RPG. There was a time that I sneered at D&D and its derivatives, but that was decades ago. I have fond memories of B/X D&D and (to a limited extent) AD&D 1e, but otherwise I'm only interested in D&D from an intellectual perspective (how it impacts the industry, the trends it's riding/influencing, etc.) and as a path people can take to the broader world of RPGs. Over the decades there have been popular RPGs that, despite trying my best, haven't proven to be a good fit for me, such as Fudge/Fate/Fate Accelerated. That style was interesting to me for a brief time, but despite trying I haven't been able to maintain enough interest in any of them to learn to love playing and/or running them. Cortex Prime is the closest fit in this broad category, but it too isn't quite right for me. And there have been popular RPGs that initially seemed like a good fit but didn't work out over the long haul: GURPS, BRP, Savage Worlds, D6 System. All four are *this close* to being great fits, but all have one or more serious flaws (from my perspective) that make me wish I was playing/running a different game. These days, I know I'm highly unlikely to enjoy any RPG that uses a flat distribution curve. Same for games with specialty dice (like the FFG Star Wars system). Honestly, any RPG that uses dice other than bog standard six-siders is unlikely to be very interesting to me at this point. Might be worth a one-shot or as a curiosity, but not for anything serious or long-lasting. So I mostly stick to HERO System, Classic Traveller (and Cepheus Engine/Sword of Cepheus/etc.), and Tunnels & Trolls (and Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes as well as Monster! Monster!).

If the Arpanet folks had known, I wonder if they'd have unplugged that first node and smashed it to bits.

In my experience, folks who are comfortable with the complexity of D&D 5e are often fine with HERO System, especially if you start them out with a short scenario using pregens, thoughtfully-designed templates, or the Champions Character Creation Cards so they can focus on learning the system as it is played before being asked to design characters for that system. I completely agree that a well-designed character sheet is incredibly helpful (as is avoiding acronyms). I like the long-standing advice for newbie supers players to ignore END and avoid Limitations, but I normally only do that if I'm starting them out with a higher-powered game. For street-level stuff, I usually leave those things in. But, above all, I keep the characters simple. No fancy character builds. Just enough skills/talents/powers to give players good choices, with as few Power Modifiers as I can get away with, presented in as plain English as I can manage. I used to agree that hiding the Speed Chart from new groups was best, but in the last couple of years I've changed my mind. Now I see the Speed Chart as not only integral to the system, but a prime reason to play HERO. I see it as kind of like chess having different forms of movement for the various chess pieces. Edited to add: My experience is that the above works well for smaller groups of 4 or so players. I don't know how well it would work with a large group of new players.

We watched two superhero movies over the weekend that stand in pretty stark contrast to one another. Everything Everywhere All at Once: Wow. This one showed genre literacy *and* an understanding of good story structure. It's not flawless; it felt repetitive for a while. Chopping 20 minutes off the runtime would improve it. But otherwise, it's fantastic. An interesting story about characters that are easy to understand and care about. The main character goes through a transformation and by the end of the story is truly changed. Surprising stuff happens. Delightful stuff happens. One of the best supers movies I've ever seen. Thor - Love and Thunder: Oh what a wasted opportunity. They finally get back to the Jane Foster storyline, but they never make it interesting. It's mostly a bunch of set-pieces that look like they could have been lifted from a video game, punctuated by hit-or-miss jokes. I'm not sure what the intended audience is. Parts seemed made for small children, while others seemed unsuitable for them. But either way, this one is very skippable. Glad I didn't see this one in the theater. Better to read a one-paragraph summary and move on.

Some of it's from the continuing drift away from forums, but I agree about seasonality as well. Certainly I've been occupied with other things lately. Bu I'll be cranking up another Hero campaign for the fall and winter. There's nothing better to bring warmth and light to a long, cold, dark winter.

We needed a new car, so despite it being a terrible time to look for one, we began our search a couple of months ago. Depending on manufacturer, we were told ordering a car meant waiting anywhere from 6 weeks to 12 months for delivery, and all of them said no one knows what you'll get -- you'll be kept updated, but at any point in the process, the manufacturer may decide to delete features due to supply chain issues. Depending on dealership, we were told buying one of the few new cars on the lot would cost us $2,500 to $10,000 over MSRP. (Factory orders are generally at MSRP.) We looked at all of our options and realized that there was only one SUV that fit our requirements (>5,000 lbs towing, good towing technology, a big cargo area behind the 2nd row (at least as big as the Outback we were trading in, which ruled out most midsize and smaller SUVs), the ability to fit comfortably in our normal-sized garage (which ruled out most trucks and full-sized SUVs), adaptive cruise control, and most importantly comfortable seats for long road trips): a Ford Explorer. So we used the build tool on Ford's site to build what we wanted, then sent it off to the local Ford dealerships that seemed to be run the best, letting them know that was what we wanted. We told them we'd probably place an order in November. A couple of weeks passed, and one of the dealerships had exactly what we wanted on their lot. Another customer had placed a special order months ago, but backed out of the deal just before delivery could take place. And they'd ordered exactly what was in our build. That dealership was the one that had the lowest over-MSRP prices at $2500, so we said we'd go ahead and give it a test drive and see if we could reach a deal. We ended up getting what we wanted for the trade in (which, in our state, also means a reduction in the sales tax, as the portion paid for by the trade-in doesn't get taxed), and got the Explorer for $500 below MSRP! To top it off, Ford's running a deal where you get 0% for 66 months. I didn't think I'd see 0% again in my lifetime. So while it's not great to have a car payment again, we're still pretty darned happy about how this worked out, especially given the circumstances.

Of course it's my "go-to."

I ran an experimental HERO Lite game which leaned heavily on characteristic throws because I ditched the skill system and instead used Talents, which gave broad competence in an area as well as characteristic roll bonuses in related circumstances. Each character got one Talent for free and could get one more by choosing a (pre-made) Disadvantage. The system worked OK, but wasn't really appealing to my group at the time. I'd been intrigued by the OSR movement and the simpler game designs coming out and had wanted to see what I could do to adapt HERO to that sort of philosophy. The problem was, this design wasn't solving a problem my group had, so no one had much enthusiasm for it. Also, I never came up with a satisfying simplified combat system.

And that's why cries of hypocrisy have no effect.