Justin Alexander

If you cannot go to the bathroom at work, you cannot go to work. If you cannot go to the bathroom at school, you cannot go to school. This effectively bans transgender people from a broad swath of public life in the UK

Felt like I had watched just enough of the various CW shows before giving up on them years ago for everything to resonate.

Crisis episodes is how I fell back into it, actually. They're quite fun and probably the best Crisis adaptation in film/TV, largely because they're the only one that -- like the original Crisis -- was able to evoke a multitude of actual continuity.

True.

The good news is you can just watch the excellent first season, treat it as a complete story in its own right, and then bail.

a man in a red flash suit is running down a street . ALT: a man in a red flash suit is running down a street .

When a show goes off the rails, it can sometimes be tough to remember the good stuff.

To whit, I'd kind of forgotten just how good the first season of The Flash TV series was. Great actors, tight scripts, fantastic season plotting.

Photo of a window seat in the Northern train to Leeds via Sheffield. A copy of the GAZ1 Karameikos book sits on the table underneath a copy of “So You Want To Be A Game Master”. The view from the window is urban Nottingham.

On the train to Sheffield …

I had to bike 10 miles, uphill both ways for my HK action fix.

(No, seriously. Not a joke.)

Criterion streamer has both a Sammo Hung sampler and a Johnnie To Essentials? Good lord, I had to trade crumpled twenties to a guy at Grand Central for a decent VHS dub of My Lucky Stars. It is an age of miracles.

What you're seeing there is WOPR (from Wargames) testing it's hypothesis, comparing predictions to real life outcomes, and drawing a conclusion based on actual analysis of evidence.

Current AI can't do any of that. It's at best pattern recognition. Most of it is just a random babble generator.

Join me for RANDOM GM TIPS on Twitch!

It's happening right now!

twitch.tv/TheAlexandrian

SERENITY.

Simon is shot.

Vividly remember the woman crying out in abject terror and pain, "Oh god! He's going to kill them all!"

SPEED RUNNER.

During the final race a guy next to me just murmuring over and over, "this is awesome this is awesome this awesome this is awesome."

He was right.

map fragment under a hex grid depicting a meadow of giant butterflies among scattered trees and woods, just south of a red-looking river, flanked by some tall cliffs.

Monarch Meadow.

Two Rivers map fragment for Tales Unrolled actual play series.

#cartography #ttrpg #dnd #art

If any rich people are looking for odes and/or praise-filled RPG scenarios, I'll do it for the price of 175 cows.

Bargain, really.

A New Statue Suddenly Appeared on Easter Island. That Doesn't Make Sense. Scientists thought they found them all.

New Call of Cthulhu scenario just dropped.

www.popularmechanics.com/science/arch...

Word

it's actually Gradient Descent but yes mosh rips not because it's got a cool discord server or whatever but because everybody's just churning out adventures

I've been informed that F9 was released back in 2021.

I'm completely lost.

Random Worldbuilding – Fantastical Scars If you went back in time, there would be plenty of differences you’d expect to see, but there would also be a lot of differences that would take you by surprise. (As L.P. Hartley wrote, “The pas

Magical healing spells leave distinctive silver-blue scars.

You can tell those who lead truly violent lives, because the scars spread until they seem to be entirely silver-skinned.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/49...

You've piqued my interest.

Dang. I had all my money on Mark Mercer replacing Matt.

This is why you shouldn't gamble, kids.

Yup. One of the reasons I hadn't bought a pamphlet for myself in something like 15 years.

Although they sometimes make the even harder: The OWUD collection won't include the interlocking FF stories, so you need to figure out how to flip back and forth between different collections.

Mortgage Company: "Go paperless! Save the planet!"

... aren't you the same people sending me weekly spam letters to refinance my home equity?

But I just try to imagine a young kid trying to navigate this for themselves.

And it's not exactly a mystery why the sales of Marvel/DC superhero comics continue to flounder.

They make it so damn hard to just read the stuff you already want to read.

And it's impossible to do that without getting spoiled on all of the story details.

Thankfully I can take that bullet for my daughter this time.

So how do I fix it?

Well, first I have to go track down back issues of One World Under Doom. (Can't wait for the collection; it won't be out until next year.)

Then I have to go track down a reading order online to make sure I'm not missing anything else. And also what order should I read these in?

Except there's a catch: ONE WORLD UNDER DOOM.

The new Marvel mega-event is interwoven with the FF book. But I don't have those issues, so there's just giant gaps in the story.

And my kid is now bummed out.

But we did, eventually, run out of issues and so we turned our attention to Lee/Kirby FF and Lee/Ditko Spidey.

Then we went back down to the store and grabbed a few months of pull list. The covers got her excited all over again and she was champing at the bit to start reading.

And this is, in fact, an incredible run.

North has embraced the expanded family and he's pushing the science fiction elements by taking bleeding edge science and giving it a fun, fanastical twist. (Pun intended.)

Cover of Fanastic Four, Volume 3: The Impossible is Probable - North, Coello, Fiorelli, Montaring, Gomez.

Several months ago my daughter saw the cover of @ryannorth.ca Fantastic Four collection.

She was fascinated, so we read all the collections and she wanted more.

So we went down to the comic store and started a pull list to get FF each month.

First pamphlets I've bought in years.

The term "module" was still being used in fan circles, IME.

And at this point you have to look at the OSR: With a desire to recall the earliest days of the hobby, they re-popularize the term module both as branding and also because they're doing modular scenarios again.