Hey everyone,

I haven’t gotten much done in the past week, mainly because I’ve got a massive toothache that makes it hard to concentrate on anything. I had the same problem with the same tooth a few years ago and went to two different dentists and they couldn’t do anything. I suspect this has more to do with my insurance only covering awful dentists than any strange medical mystery, but this time I’m just going through a shitload of Anbesol and hoping it goes away like it did last time.

Currently working on version 3 (I think) of the camp rules for Diner Punks. The first version was way too much like spreadsheet juggling, the second was too abstract to be terribly useful, so now I’m going for something in the middle. I’ve realized that any version of base-building rules is probably going to be more complicated than some people will want. Also, any version is going to be long and take up a lot of space. So I’m considering breaking them out into a separate book and doing a variation on “roll on a table to see what the camp wants/needs” for the main game.

I also need to reconfigure the release timeline. According to the original plan, the Kickstarter should have just ended and the book would be out in July. Since that’s not going to happen, I probably need to come up with a new plan to give myself some kind of timeline.

Amazon has a new program where if I recommend things and you buy them, I get a few cents. So far I’ve put up a few book lists here. If you want to buy/read any of these, use the link so I can get my pennies.

Books & Movies & Stuff

Currently reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen, mainly because I saw an interview Adam Conover did with him and the book sounded interesting. He’s a philosopher who focuses on games and metrics, and the book is how the two are so similar but one is fun and one is miserable. So far I’m enjoying it enough that I plan to check out some of his other books.

Road Wars: Max Fury, if you can’t guess from the title, is an Asylum Mad Max “homage.” It’s exactly the level of quality you expect from Asylum.

Strange Darling: I watched this because I vaguely remembered seeing or hearing something somewhere that made me think it might be worth watching. It might have just been the fact that it has Ed Begley Jr. and Beaver from Veronica Mars, both of whom tend to show up in more good movies than bad ones. This was not one of the good ones. I suspected I was in trouble when the opening screen said that it was told in 6 chapters, then started with chapter 3. I keep hoping that ond day a movie will tell the story out of chronological order for some reason other than “Pulp Fiction did it,” but this movie continued my trend of being disappointed. It’s not necessarily that the movie’s bad so much as there’s just not a lot of movie there. At least half the run time is spent lingering on things that the director seems to think are clever or artistic. Most of them are not, and definitely not interesting enough to spend so much time on. The fact that the lead actress seems at least as unjustifiably impressed with herself as the director is with himself doesn’t help. It’s kind of a perfect storm of arthouse pretension and Tarantino wannabe.

Threads: I’ve heard that this is one of the more realistic and disturbing post-nuke movies. That description is accurate. I’m glad I watched it, but probably won’t watch it again.

Gunslingers: Starring Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham, Nicolas Cage, and a bunch of people who you’re pretty sure you’ve seen in something but can’t quite place. Dorff kills a Rockefeller and flees to a town in Kentucky where everyone’s an outlaw who’s faked their own death. His brother shows up with a posse to take him back. An hour-long gunfight with brief pauses ensues. Cage Cages hard.

Jojo Rabbit: Proof that Mel Brooks doesn’t have a monopoly on making Hitler hilarious. Bowie songs work in German as well as Portuguese.

Companion: It’s another killer sex robot story, but at least this one has an elaborate heist plot baked into it. Not bad, but nothing terribly unexpected.

Max Headroom: I remember watching this when it originally aired, but I’d forgotten exactly how hard it leaned into cyberpunk (possibly because I didn’t know what cyberpunk was when I watched it). It looks terrible, massively oversells the power of television in the future (completely understandable considering when it was made), and has a few bad things that you kind of have to expect from something made in the 80s (sexism, Japanese accents with racist levels of exaggeration, Bill Maher, but overall I enjoyed it.

I’m about 7 or 8 episodes into The Winter King, mainly because I’m a sucker for King Arthur stories. It’s fine so far, but it feels like it’s still setting up the groundwork before the real story starts, which is probably not a great hing this far in.

Just started Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie in the background while I write this. Haven’t seen enough to have an opinion, but Cheech & Chong rarely disappoint.

That’s it for now. Time to numb my head again. Eventually I hope to get back to the point where the newsletter is something I put together over a few weeks instead of at the last minute when I realize it’s due, but this is not that month.

Steve