It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Well holy crap, that’s a year’s worth of these. I’m certainly not blogging like I used to but the monthly commitment is working out!
And what a good lineup for my 12th month. The top line collections rotate around two unquestionable masters, and the good programming doesn’t end there. We’ll eat well in September. Let’s get to it.
Welcome back to my read-through of Dark Inheritance, a mostly forgotten child of the D20 boom! Find all the entries in the series here.
The first chapter after the introduction is a big old lore dump. This matches general expectations at the time, although you know there’s gonna be more lore integrated into the mechanics, and it’s also probably smart for the modern world but occult setting. It’s only 20 pages long, which probably helps explain why it was an impulse purchase for me way back when — I skimmed this quickly in the dealer’s hall.
Well that was an excellent week. Some vacations are a great way to disconnect from work while not being at all relaxing; this was one of those. I came back tired and a bit uncomfortable from a week of trying to navigate diabetes plus campus area quick food plus short blocks of time between movies. Informative on my current physical limits, though, and it was a shining Fantasia in terms of movies. We hope to go back next year, although in the process of going through this blog and tagging all my old Fantasia entries, I’ve found out how often I said that only to hit blockers. 30th anniversary, though!
I put together a ranked list of every feature I saw over on Letterboxd. For here, we’ll do some overview thoughts.
I was insane pleased to be able to see the new 4K restoration of Bullet in the Head, and it was everything I’d hoped. I think it’s been over 20 years since I’ve seen it last. My jaw still dropped at the savage pessimism. John Woo’s masterpiece.
And then I saw another masterpiece, Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Metatextural homage and critique of the Eurospy genre, drawing on fumetti extensively. It all makes for a very complex film. It made me gasp out loud at one point. So two five star movies at one festival? Success by any measure.
I was delightfully surprised by The Virgin of Quarry Lake, which cemented my belief that there’s something in Argentina that’s encouraging good film. Carrie meets Mean Girls in a horror film that uses the 1999 Argentinian economic crisis as a backdrop for a story about the fear of loss. Dog of God was not surprising: it’s exactly the profane Latvian historical rotoscoped epic that the trailer promises. Mother of Flies was much as I expected in tone — the Adams family is really dialing in on their groove — while also being a sublime experience. The audience in Theater Hall at Fantasia is really special; listening to the family talk about how much they love making movies together is amazing.
Points for every filmmaker doing their best work on a minuscule budget. Mother of Flies, The Serpent’s Skin (also with the Adams on the soundtrack!), A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — I come to Fantasia for these. Didn’t love all of them, am glad that there’s a way for these to find an audience.
Broadened my world with movies from three new to me countries: Latvia, Kazakhstan (the incredibly charming Sasyq), and Bolivia (Cielo, although the director wasn’t Bolivian). Coincidental but fun.
Great week and I can’t wait for next year.
Midway through my week in Montreal for Fantasia Festival, and boy is my ass tired. Losing weight is excellent, it’s just that I don’t have as much padding as I used to and Concordia University lecture hall chairs were not completely designed for two hour stretches. Worth it, though.
This is not my look at the full festival — that’ll come next week. Instead, I’ve been spending time thinking about why I cherish this festival so much.
Part of it is simply the continuity. My first Fantasia was 21 years ago — Chris and I drove up from Boston for the weekend. My second one was a couple of years later, and was the first one with S.; then for reasons which I’m sure were sane at the time I didn’t go again for like ten years. Then another eight years. After 2023, S. and I realized there was no reason not to go as often as yearly, and here we are again two years later.
I can look back on those previous visits and trace a lot of my life’s changes. Not just that this blog ran on Movable Type for the first one. I was gaming more the year we went from Montreal directly to Indianapolis for GenCon, which is not something that seems appealing right now even if it wasn’t exhausting. The differences between driving up from Boston and flying, which come to think of it is probably why I had those really big gaps. The ways I’m reacting to movies changed considerably during the pandemic.
So that’s one thing. Then there’s the audience: I am 100% sure that every single movie I see in the Henry F. Hall (except Jeruzalem) is benefiting from the enthusiasm of the audience. Every movie, no matter how bad, should be seen with audiences that are so happy to be there.
Finally, most importantly, there’s the risks. The movie industry is struggling in real and important ways; I can’t minimize the difficulties around original ideas, mid-budget movies that just don’t get made any more, and so on. All of that is real.
What’s also real, though, is that a majority of the movies I see here every year are taking big swings. I didn’t have to love Redux Redux last night to notice that it was made by a couple of brothers who just wanted to make a Terminator homage, so they grabbed a bunch of actors and some cheap locations and took their knowledge of the craft and put together two hours of film that made them happy. That’s fucking cool. I did love Sasyq, and it’s made by a Kazakhstan dude who’s played the ominous thug in a few Hollywood movies and TV shows and wanted to put his dream of a fairy tale on screen. I absolutely adored Dog of God, and it happened because another pair of irreverent brothers wanted to mythologize the story of a werewolf trial and realized they could get Latvian state funding for it as an experimental film. “Nobody cared what was in it as long as we had the logos in the right place at the beginning and the end of the movie.” Fuck yeah.
This festival reminds me that filmmakers are still finding ways to bring their weird little visions to life, with varying degrees of competency. This week is a celebration of parts of the human spirit that I will always love without reservation. Much of the time I get to see the directors come up before the movie and thank a rabidly excited audience; some of them have been here before, and some of them are experiencing this for the first time. How can I not be grateful for the opportunity to welcome them?
What a fun lineup. I think the Channel’s really nailing the summer feel this year. As always, there’s a palpable absence of Boston Crime collections, but I imagine they’re just waiting for the fall to get into that one.
I don’t own a lot of remnants of the D20 boom any more, just a few select books, for the novelty and quality of the ideas rather than for anything mechanical. Tynes’s D20 Call of Cthulhu, for example. The least remembered of these is a D20 Modern setting called Dark Inheritance, which I bought at GenCon. I absolutely adored this back in the day, for its weird mix of genres and modern occult vibe, plus I always thought D20 Modern looked like an interesting system. So in my constant effort to blog a bit more, I dug around till I found my copy, pulled it out, and am spending some time reading it and blogging my thoughts. This is not a review, because I haven’t played it, although that’d be a kick — it’s just a once over. No promises on how often I write these.
The original book was published in 2003; I believe there’s also a Spycraft version, published a year later. It is not available in PDF. Noble Knight has a copy of the D20 version, and it occasionally shows up on eBay. The publisher is Mythic Dreams Studios, which appears to have been mostly Chad Justice. Chad is no longer working in the industry and Mythic Dreams only had these two releases, despite plans for other books as per an advertisement in the back of this one. Still, one solid 200 page campaign book isn’t bad.
The other writers are a range, career wise. Alphabetically, we have Edward Milton, Jason Olsan. Aaron Rosenberg, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Jeremy Tibbs, Wil Upchurch, and Sam Witt. There’s no indication of who wrote what, but I’d bet that Ryder-Hanrahan wrote at least some of the words that sparked my imagination back then. The cover artists is a dude named Mark Sasso, who sets the tone with a painting of a shadowy figure stepping forward out of what appears to be a fire. Sasso’s gone on to what looks like a decent career in and out of the TTRPG space, with some fantasy-inflected design work for the WWE and metal bands like Dio.
The interior art is B&W, mostly spot illos. The book is good 2000s TTRPG design: clear layout, in-world fiction broken out into sidebars, nothing to complain about. This is definitely the era when people expected big metaplot and lots of fiction in their game books.
OK, let’s dig in.
Summertime!
Pretty solid lineup coming in July; last month set a very high bar but we’re definitely continuing with those sun-drenched themes. Plus, uh, Haneke.
It’s clearly the beginning of summer because Criterion’s June lineup is even more summery than last month’s. And last month they did a whole collection of Coastal Thrillers.
The May Criterion lineup is, in my book, timely and exceptional. I am going to be excited for perhaps controversial reasons; let’s dig in! (Man, and I completely forgot to post this in a timely manner. Had it ready days ago.)
Umpteenth in an occasional series discussing games I might ilke to run or play someday. What’s on my mind in 2025? In no particular order…