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Summer 2023 Digest

Features
Patron Pick – Last of Shelia [Matt]
Patron Pick – Philadelphia [Bekah]
Patron Pick – The Social Dilemma [Matt]
Patron Pick – Nine Days [Bekah]
Book Update – July/August 2023
My Favorite Films with a Fireworks Scene
My Favorite Willem Dafoe Performances
My Favorite Films Released in August
My Favorite Films of 1983

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Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn Part Five

Supersworn Pre-Alpha
Designed & Written by Ben Adams

You can check out this game and many other hacks of Ironsworn here.

Read part four of our Supersworn actual play here.

Once again, I used Mythic GM Emulator 2ed tools to set up this session along with Starforged’s built-in Start of Session move. That latter move generated this for me: “Unforeseen aid is on the way or within reach.” I got this at the start of the last session in the context of a comic book adventure; I interpret this as another hero guest-starring. I had a list of names and randomly picked one: The Forever Kid. So at some point, we will meet The Forever Kid and learn what he is about. Then, I decided the Chaos Factor from the last session had gone up from 7 to 8 and rolled on Mythic’s scene table. I was told to go with an Altered Scene with the prompt “Remove a character.” This was the moment I decided to just reveal the phone call from Aunt Laurie was an illusion removing her from the moment.

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Comic Book Review – New Gods by Jack Kirby

New Gods by Jack Kirby (2018)
Reprints New Gods #1-11, New Gods reprint series excerpts, DC Graphic Novel #4: The Hunger Dogs, and excerpts from Who’s Who
Written by Jack Kirby
Art by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Vince Colletta, D. Bruce Berry, Don Heck, and Greg Theakston

Did DC truly understand what Jack Kirby had given them in his Fourth World concept? Do they realize it yet, or will they just never get it? While Jimmy Olsen was the foot in the door, once Kirby got his core books off the ground, he unleashed a reinvention of what comics could be. New Gods is a comic that doesn’t always have to be about its central characters in the present day. During this year-long run, Kirby would go back in time and tell us stories from these characters’ pasts or stories that gave us information they were not privy to. The result is a sprawling synthesis of Biblical storytelling and modern pop art sensibilities. This is the kind of comic book that only a person like Jack Kirby could have conjured up, a vast cosmic ocean emerging from the mind of a true artistic visionary.

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June 2023 Posting Schedule

Film Series

June 2nd thru 23rd – Queer Cinema

Pink Flamingos, Paris is Burning, Maurice, My Own Private Idaho, But I’m a Cheerleader, The Watermelon Woman, Beau Travail, Happy Together, Mysterious Skin, Bad Education

June 26th thru 30th – The Adventures of Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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Movie Review – Aguirre, The Wrath of God

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)
Written & Directed by Werner Herzog

Germany was a very different country after World War II than before. It was sundered in two, the city of Berlin divided in half. German cinema, which had been quite a robust center of challenging artistic work before the rise of the Nazis, was gone and didn’t recover in the wake of the collapse. Meanwhile, there was the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and Britain’s Angry Young Man subgenre of pictures. In 1962, a group of German filmmakers released a manifesto declaring Germany’s old cinema dead and the birth of something new. In 1965, the East German government set up a fund to provide money to filmmakers, but that work often failed to challenge the institutions that young Germans saw as responsible for the events of the war. It was in the early 1970s that the most vital voices in the country came forward. You likely know some of their names: Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders. Others you probably do not. For April, I’ll be looking at some of the essential movies in this movement where the film served as a way to comment on a society existing in shock. 

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Solo Tabletop RPG Review – The Portal at Hill House

The Portal at Hill House (Press Pot Games)
Designed by Travis Hill & Linda Farris-Hill

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt scared by a tabletop roleplaying game. Plenty of games fit into the Horror genre label: Vampire the Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, the smaller horror games, the horror scenarios for other non-horror games, the list goes on & on. I’ve never been genuinely scared by tabletop games. Admittedly, I only really got into tabletop around 2012 and checked out of group play in 2018. I found most horror games to be action-adventure games with horror genre elements. It’s the same way Blade the Vampire Hunter isn’t horror; it’s superhero stories. Horror, for me, is a growing and eventually suffocating sense of dread. There is something you cannot explain, and it is slowly getting closer, and once it does, you have no hope. That’s horror. So, when I came across The Portal at Hill House I wondered how horror would work in solo play. Maybe in this context, it would be scarier?

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