Month: May 2018

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Champions Now, baby! This is the fruit of the Champions, 3rd ed game I’ve been playing with MadJay Brown and Ron Edwards .

This is Ron’s take on a “4th” edition of Champs, I.e. “What if the consolidated Hero System never happened?” It’s also a product of all the great comics and RPG blogging he’s been doing on his Dr. Xaos blog.

And, hey, you can watch some AP footage of us right on the KS page!

I would love to see this come to fruition, so please spread the word.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/herogames/champions-now

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Frozen was our family movie night yesterday. My son seems to enjoy it, but my wife and I were pretty bored. It felt like forever for the film to get going, and lots of the musical numbers felt forced. You know, like they knew they’d be adapting it for Broadway so they had to pack in lots of set pieces. Even my son, at one point, asked why Anna “is singing the same song over and over.”

It got better once the “core team” was together — Anna, Kristoff, Sven, and Olaf. But it still was kind of all over the place for us. And I also felt like the film didn’t know whether it was about Anna or Elsa.

Mostly we’re stunned this was such a worldwide success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_%282013_film%29

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h/t to Dave Turner for pointing me to this great rebuttal of the Atlantic article I shared yesterday about American aristocracy.

In an age when the likes of Jeff Bezos, the Mercers, and Sheldon Adelson are accumulating dynastic fortunes, it’s also just a bit precious to declare that the new “aristocracy” is made up of people who pay too much for yoga classes and buy their groceries at Whole Foods. The average net worth among adults in the 95th to 99th percentile is about $1.7 million. Among the 0.1 percent, it’s about $60 million. Who, exactly, are the aristocrats again?

https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-percent-the-1-percent-are-still-the-problem.html

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The source of the trouble, considered more deeply, is that we have traded rights for privileges. We’re willing to strip everyone, including ourselves, of the universal right to a good education, adequate health care, adequate representation in the workplace, genuinely equal opportunities, because we think we can win the game. But who, really, in the end, is going to win this slippery game of escalating privileges?

Today is definitely a “I want to emigrate” day.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

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The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate.

Rebecca Solnit: The Coup Has Already Happened

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Tangled was family movie night this week. I loved it, and my son had a blast. Mandy Moore reminded me how secretly awesome she is, and Zach Levi made me want to finally finish watching Chuck.

Mother Gothel is also one of the richest villains I’ve ever seen in a Disney film. Also possibly the most horrific.

Oh, and if this film were played with Burning Wheel, Maximus would earn both MVP and Workhorse (heh).

I honestly have no memory of the film’s original release, so it was a pleasant surprise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangled