We have such sights to show you, Charlie Brown.

Kvetching online about Steam console specs from vocal PC Master Race types has really highlighted the fact that some people like playing videogames while some people like spending a lot of money so they can cock wave about meaningless benchmark numbers, and that these are two separate hobbies.

Apparently I've arranged to see a Nirvana covers band tonight, but one with an Elvis impersonator as a front man. That definitely sounds like something I'd want to see. Bonus is it turns out the support is called Nic Cage Against The Machine. www.elvana.co.uk

Dammit, all this thinking and talking about V:tM has ended up with me buying a ton of Vampire: the Eternal Struggle cards. Black Chantry have done a phenomenal job keeping this game going and have managed to modernise it and bring it in line with V5 without losing what made it so good 30 years ago.

More musings on the V:tM TTRPG: The underlying system was, imo, not great and even at the time I had issues with it. I found it mainly OK, but required significant effort on my part when running it to keep things Working.

Recent conversation with an old TTRPG buddy around our shared love of V:tM and the WoD in general and the shortcomings I feel the entire thing had. Important to understand that I still love a lot of what WoD is/was despite feeling there are some serious problems with it.

Seriously, at this point just have James Bond fight Predator and be done with it.

Good golly, I missed some odd TTRPG discussions this week. Like, "rule of cool" being misunderstood is all well and good, but fundamentally if you want a specific play experience and the game/system you're running your game with doesn't do that, then that's a shortcoming or mismatch.

Fuck, I'm trying not to buy more videogame shit. www.kickstarter.com/projects/185...

I've realised I'm way too busy* to create a full on dungeon for my current OSE TTRPG game, so I've decided to randomly generate the content of rooms by just picking them blidfolded from the various megadungeon nonsense books I own but will never run. * by which I mean lazy

Mrs Rich decided she wanted to watch a horror film. Not just any random one, she specifically wanted to watch Poultrygiest: Night of the Chicken Dead. So I tracked it down and it turns out to be a Lloyd Kaufman Troma film. She REALLY wasn't prepared for this nonsense. m.imdb.com/title/tt0462...

Republica aren't a band I paid much attention to back in the day. They had their hits, I kinda liked their albums and they seemed to be playing locally every week. So seeing them for the first time in nearly 30 years on Friday it was nice to see they're still pretty fun.

Looking through the Outgunned PDFs while I wait for my books to be delivered. Initial impressions and hot takes, bearing in mind this is after a brief read of the core and a skim of the 2 Action Flicks books:

Got bored and bought the RIFTS mega bundles from bundle of holding last night and spent some fun time reading the frankly batshit nonsense those books contain. I kinda feel weirdly fond of RIFTS, despite knowing both intellectually and instinctively that's it's a complete load of arse.

Spent some time with Jump Space over the weekend and it was pretty fun! Mainly pitched at coop with up to 4 players, but pretty playable solo. The solo aspect is good because I hate jumping into a multiplayer thing without having time to practice. store.steampowered.com/app/1757300/...

Looked at the Outgunned TTRPG and it sounds pretty neat. Will admit I'm struggling a little with the product line. There's a core book, some things called Flicks which I'm struggling to find details on but look like example settings? And World of Killers which appears to be "Not John Wick, Honest"?

Saw Weapons this weekend, and while I generally enjoy horror films, I don't really consider myself a horror fan as such. If a horror film is just about scary monsters, there's better be a good plot. If it relies on suspense alone, I'm probably going to get bored if nothing is happening on screen.

The original thread doesn't appear to allow me to respond, but I found this an interesting read. While there are lots of interesting comments and further explanation on topic, there's one thing I want to ask @jdragsky.bsky.social about this:

I'm dead exciting, me. Mrs Rich and I ordered a new washing machine. I've had the old one 18 years and don't know how old it was when I got it. It was in a house I bought, left by the previous owner. Moved with us 3 years ago. Still works, just not terribly well.

Fun rainy day project for me over the weekend: get Bloodborne working ok pc via an emulator and see if the thing can run well on my rig with higher frame rate.

Ok TTRPG folks, the players in my weekly OSE/OSR campaign have decided they're opening a tavern in a remote gold rush town. What kind of things do they need to consider and line up so this runs smoothly?

Pivot moment for the ongoing Oldschool Essentials TTRPG campaign. Going from the initial "let's just play some pre-written dungeons while we figure out what this campaign is about" into "ok, we've got a grip on the characters and setting, let's explore that"

Just realising I'm so far gone that this unholy abomination on my desk seems really normal to use.

I've been running a game using Old School Essentials for over a year now and it's reached another turning point. Meaning I have to put some work in to figure out what to do next with it. TL;DR is that I can't just keep running pre-written adventures, something has to change.

I'm not easily given to hyperbole, but holy shit Life of Chuck is fucking amazing. Fantastic cast, great script, beautiful cinematography, the whole deal. Disturbing and delightful. It might not land for everyone, but it's quite honestly one of my favourite films of the last decade.

A thread in which I ask questions about Alien: Earth after watching the first 2 episodes. Prefacing with the comment that I don't hate it, it looks great, cast is excellent and overall I'm enjoying it, but... (Obviously contains spoilers)

They did, in fact, play Jesus Built my Hotrod and NWO. I am now absolutely wrecked, deaf as fuck and officially too old for mosh pits.

This time on "Rich sees a band he liked in the 90s, but also it's really hot" 29 degrees and Ministry. Hopefully this will be a proper Ministry set and not the awful emo tour they did recently.

Dammit, I'm in the wrong Hampton!

Oh my fucking god, this Amazon War of the Worlds film is complete dogshit. Like, Ice Cube needs a usb stick to save the world from the aliens and orders an express Amazon drone delivery. Which flies the usb stick to him during the alien invasion. In an Amazon streaming film. Fucking hell.

I thought about doing the whole "one like = one TTRPG hot take" but then I realised that there are only about 38 million Bluesky users and I have more opinions than that so it seems like a waste of time.

Finally managed to get my hands on one of these after them being out of stock for so long. Decided to test it out with the monitor in the dining room and it took me ages to realise that unlike the real Spectrum, this doesn't have the audio built into the device and the sound is transmitted via HDMI

Everyone is talking about it I might as well: I saw Superman, I liked it a lot. Problem is, I'm such a massive DC comics nerd, and it seems that James Gunn is too, and that he loves all the same things about DC that I do. So I honestly don't know how useful my opinion on this is to anyone else.

Comfort songs for tonight while I'm a bit too old and pissed to sleep for a while: Mindriot by Soundgarden Ahab Rex's cover of the Pigface/Nine Inch Nails track Suck 4th of July by Aimee Mann for some reason Mama by God Machine 3 different live versions of Front 242's Welcome to Paradise

Holy moly, GPUs got swole while I wasn't looking.

Listening to the newly released Edge of the Abyss album from @calvalouise.bsky.social and DAMN IT'S GREAT! calvalouise.bandcamp.com/album/edge-o...

Ok, so getting COVID sucks every time, but why the fuck do I have to get it in a bloody heatwave? Like, the universe decided I wasn't sweating enough? Got a virus? Have some more heat, wanker!

I'm not a huge anime fan, but I'm sick as a dog so I decided to watch something called Frieren which a fair few people have said is good. Yeah, I'm on episode 7 so far. It's pretty good. Really damn good.

Basing something I'm writing on Dracula, wherein Dracula doesn't cast a reflection. And I know Kim Newman did a bunch of stuff around (somewhat) modern Dracula, but I'm trying to come up with some logic as to Dracula being seen or not by various modern imaging devices.

The topic of SLA Industries came up last night and remember the interesting setting and traumatically bad system it had. I'm aware there's a 2nd edition which apparently has a way better system. More importantly it sounds like they've done a lot to modernise the setting.

OMG. FROZEN CAT TREAT GOOP WITH A LOLLY STICK IN TO MAKE TREATS FOR HOT CATS OMG. BEST HOT WEATHER CAT TREAT EVER! (Even better with sound)

Watched Heretic and found it weirdly frustrating as a movie that didn't know what it was. Until then it became apparent that the point of it was that you don't know what kind of movie it is and then it clicked.

Annoying adventures in cooking: Wife wants me to make a Thai green curry in the slow cooker. I look up a recipe and buy the ingredients. Ingredients include lime leaves and lemongrass. I start cooking this morning. The directions make no mention whatsoever of the lime leaves or lemon grass.

I think he's melted.

Fuck me, I think I'm being all grumpy old man because it's 1 am and I'm listening to The Blind Man by God Machine and it seems cheery.

Dry as fuck TTRPG thoughts #256: The concept of fictional events taking place in an imaginary continuity seems to be a pretty key part to RPGs. In Forge terms, the existence of a Shared Imagined Space (SIS) and things happening in it. That's NOT exclusive to RPG play, you can have SIS in other play.

Sitting in the bar at a hotel near the O2, meeting friends before a Nine Inch Nails gig, and holy shit I think the entirety of GenX is also here and dug out their old t-shirts too.

Jesus fuck, I wake up to find out there's a whole new TTRPG discourse. Initially I thought it was a masterful piece of hilarious satire, but after re reading the original post/thead 3 times it was just a take so narrow, blinkered and self defeating it's just flat out hilarious. #10Gate

This fridge magnet still makes me laugh.

Dropped into a semi random pub in York and they're serving excellent IPA and playing Rusty Cage, so this work trip involving 2 full days of travel and one broken down train so far is looking up.