Is the jury still out on 5th Edition? How is it? I never got around to it beyond a short beta hack and slash at Gen Con; at the time it seemed like a backpedal into too-familiar territory.

I think that silly random fun has moved into creative spaces like Roblox. In that game, every server is its own mod and there's all kinds of stuff, deathmatch, obstacle courses, and lots of ripoffs and clones of whatever genre or game is popular at the time. The userbase is young, I assume, but the possibilities are…

I have always been interested in lateral progression, or whatever you want to call it. A rigid leveling or standard progress path is often something to subvert rather than embrace (though, sometimes, I do love me some levelin').

It's been 20, 25 years… I'm still unsettled by that.

I haven't watched it since I was around 10, when the guy getting exploded in the decompression tank (plus all the torturous shark-in-halfenings) really fucked me up.

If only Brendan Fraser was a juggler…

Awful, awful, awful.

I went up to 'the river' with a couple of friends for our roughly-quarterly game design retreat weekend. All the games brought were in different states of completion; when it came to my contribution, I went in empty handed, mulled over some old board game ideas and cranked out a couple of workable prototypes…

So the moral of this movie is going to be "Teamwork beats angsty self-loathing?"

8 years ago in New Zealand I got one of those "just one patty" Big Macs. It was (appropriately) called a Baby Mac. Not sure what I think of this "Mac Jr." Americanization.

Great visuals though. I had to paws the video just to see everything that was going on. Mastiff cost a fortune in special effects.

I don't remember anything about it, beyond some murders and super-computers and ladders in a basement. Ripe for adaptation.

It's a class issue. Brown's books are "smart books for dumb people", and smugly complaining about how successful it is makes you one of the smart people. Bonus points if it's on the internet where people will upvote you and mock others for questioning your viewpoint.

I forgot about that. With the guy with three fingers. Classic.

He's Tom J. Hanks. Any questions?

Hiassen, yeah. That's the one I was trying to think of.

I think that's a kind way of putting it, and accurate. Dopey fun. They're terribly written, but the story has just enough connective tissue and plot twists to keep you reading. A window seat read.

They're 10 times better than Twilight. So pretty bad.

Quite the smug review.

Wait, the star hasn't been cast yet? Damn it! Where's my agent!?
Wait, I don't have one? Damn it!