Ravings of a Textual Deviant

First toads start exploding, then Greenpeace finds a sense of humor. I don’t whether to buy a lottery ticket or meteor-strike insurance. Maybe both.

My usual disclaimer of only speaking comic as a second language and not being familiar with the source material applies.

Sin City is a visually stunning, post-modern comic book movie jam-packed with the kind of comic book violence that used to get people incensed before they had MTV and reality television to complain about. This film is darker than dark, and more disturbing that Dick Cheney in a tutu and body glitter. I’m told that Frank Miller’s comic books have been shot frame-by-frame, and that look and feel is certainly there; the black-and-white is exceptionally high contrast, and the obvious animation is effectively and seamlessly mixed with the live-action/computer animation sequences. Colors are picked out, intense or muted as it serves the plot. The look of the film is as uncompromising and over-the-top as the interwoven stories. The cinematography was masterful, and I give it full points for visual effect. Extra acting points go to Elijah Wood, who has obviously learned a few things from watching Andy Serkis.

The text, although jarring and disconnected, was the distilled essence of gritty film noir. Cutting together several short stories into a feature-length film is quite the trick, and Sin City achieves a certain amount of success. There are places where it falls down, and plot holes all over the place, but so compelling that you can get through the film. I did find myself checking my watch more than once; the pacing is very uneven. The overall tone of the film tips its hat to Hitchcock, but channels classic Hollywood like a medium on acid.

Overall, I would have to say that Sin City is probably the only real comic book movie out there, as opposed to the wave of movies about comic book characters (Spiderman, X-Men, Batman, etc.) It’s compelling, like the televised trial of a particularly disturbed serial killer. Not for the faint of heart or mind, but worth the trip.

As a librarian sympathizer AND a proponent of civility, I feel compelled to urge the Reading Public to take a moment and read this.

“Us having sex would have been like a rain of toads—highly improbable, and nobody who hadn’t seen it would believe it anyway.”

Me: There is much rejoicing, and nobody has to eat any minstrels!!

Alisa: They don’t taste good, and lute strings get caught in your teeth.

And kosher for Passover no less. For someone who claims to fire up the stove only a few times a year, Karen has a suspicious number of tasty recipes.

Pumpkin Cheesecake Cupcakes
Cupcake Ingredients:
24 oz cream cheese
1 cup granulated sugar
1 can (~15 oz) pumpkin
3 eggs
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp cloves
1 tsp vanilla extract
Topping Ingredients:
250 ml (about 10 oz) sour cream
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
Directions
Cream together cream cheese + sugar + pumpkin. Add eggs one at a time. Stir in spices and vanilla. Pour batter into lined cupcake tins and bake for 30 minutes at 350 F. Let cool a couple of minutes; tops of cupcakes will settle so that there is a small indentation in each one. Mix together topping ingredients and spoon over cupcakes, right into those convenient hollows. Bake an additional 5-7 minutes. Makes 18 cupcakes.
Note
If you leave out the pumpkin and the pie spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves) but add two more eggs, you’ll get plain cheesecake cupcakes. Or swap in some other variety of fruit/spices.

Well, my day has certainly improved since I found this and played with it. If I may say so myself, the renderings are almost uncannily accurate in spirit, if not precisely so in form.

A common complaint that GMs hear is that they’re unprepared. Another common complaint GMs hear is that they’ve overprepared. How’s a GM to know when she’s hit that sweet spot, and the level of preparation is Just Right?

Personally, I feel as though I tend to overprepare, but I also tend to run complex games with lots of twisty subplots. A lot of those twists and turns come from having a well-developed and detailed sense of what’s going on in the game world. I spent one afternoon working out the family tree of a royal family in a location that I knew the players would visit (because it was a stop on an Ellipse). That seemed kind of like overkill at the time, but a) I’d like to use that particular game world again, and b) it ended up solving a plot problem that I’d put off solving until the right idea came along.

Apparently, my current place of residence is the seventh-most depressing city in the United States. Indy flunked the happy test. According to the article, Men’s Health magazine compiled the list based on antidepressant sales, suicide rates, and the number of days inhabitants reported being depressed. I wondered why, so I decided to follow up on bestplaces.net, one of the sources cited in the article. According to this Chamber of Commerce’s nightmare, Indy is also #7 on the “most expensive city in which to drive” list and #10 on the “Lowest Healthiest Cities Scores” list. On the EPA’s scale of 1-100, with 100 being best, air quality is 9 and water quality is 1. The violent crime rate is more than double the national average. According to the extended forecast I just checked, we can expect rain every day except one at least until May 5th. My curiousity was piqued by the “find your best city” feature, so I went through the survey and my top three cities were 1) Boston, 2) San Francisco, and 3) Long Island, NY. I’ve actually lived in San Francisco, and I would happily go there again. Sure, the cost of living in Indy is low; on the other hand, the statistics seem to indicate that we get what we pay for. Unfortunately, moving is not in the cards, and I’m going to be contributing to our depression rating if I think about it too much.

Ed: Their [Al-Jazeera's] idea of “fair and balanced” reporting is to interview a sane person who agrees with them, and an insane person who doesn’t.

Me: Well, it’s not as if Al-Jazeera enjoys the same reputation for credibility as, say, Fox News.