Movies reviewed this week: Gunpowder Milkshake.
Author: Bryant
Movies reviewed this week: F9.
My apologies if you’ve seen this already; I mostly wanted to capture the memories in a place more mine than Twitter is. If you are sensitive to pet death, probably move on.
Movies reviewed this week: Kill List.
Movies reviewed this week: Army of the Dead.
Movies reviewed this week: Waikiki, Together Together, and Eyimofe (This Is My Desire).
Movies reviewed this week: All Sorts, Wisdom Tooth, Deadly Cuts, Censor, Tove, and Wyrm.
Movies reviewed this week: Joint Security Area and Nowhere to Hide.
I sat down and played a session of Go Alone yesterday. It’s a solo journalling RPG in which you play an ancient magical sword that dreams of the day they can retire. It’s very hard to reach that goal; you’re pulling blocks from a Jenga tower, and when the tower falls, the sword breaks and the game ends.
The core loop is simple: you take 1-6 actions (usually inventing memories or describing events) based on prompts randomly selected by playing card draws. Most card draws require you to pull a block from the tower. That’s one day. At the end of the day, you make up a short in-person narrative about the day and what you’ve learned about your bearer and yourself.
I found that the deliberate separation of the two phases helped me set aside the knowledge that I was controlling the fiction; I consistently felt like I was reacting to events that were outside my control. There was no guarantee that I was going to get prompts that would let me tell a particular story. It also helped that the Jenga tower was completely uncontrollable. I knew I couldn’t force the story in any particular direction, because after a couple of days I was never expecting to survive.
I realized pretty early that I had to be careful about not answering unasked questions. If the prompt didn’t call for me to make up a particular bit of background, I didn’t make it up. This was relatively natural for me, since I tend towards developing characters in play anyhow, but still took some care.
In the end I wound up with a slight emotional attachment to my PC — less than usual but still there — and a narrative that arose from my treasured intersection of oracular divination and storytelling. I will do this again.
After the break, the actual play. I wrote all this in GoodNotes — the handwriting recognition was capable of capturing my scrawl, which is pretty impressive. I have a few notes on what I was thinking; these are italicized.
The Seattle Police Department has a detailed timeline of events in Seattle on 6/1/2020, the day the SPD decided to barricade a street and prevent protestors from reaching the East Precinct. I’m also drawing on Heidi Groover’s tweets from that day. NPR has a detailed timeline of the Capitol coup attempt; Aaron Rupar’s tweets were also very useful for timing of the rally.
Seattle
5:40 PM: Crowd [at Westlake Park] now approximately 7000, crowd talking about marching to East Precinct
6:02 PM: Crowd starts moving
7:11 PM: march stopped at police line, 11th and Pine [roughly a 25 minute walk from Westlake Park]
Washington, DC
10:53 AM: Giuliani calls for trial by combat
12:03 AM: Trump begins speaking
12:19 AM: Trump calls on his followers to show strength
1:11 PM: Trump’s speech ends with a call to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue
2:07 PM: Rioters arrive at the Capitol Building (roughly a 30 minute walk from the Ellipse)
Comparison
I don’t think we have a solid source for comparing numbers, but each group was in the single digit thousands.
Both cities had plenty of warning. Seattle had been seeing sometimes violent protests for a few days. In DC, Trump had been calling for his supporters to show up. Any difference in preparation is due to a difference in threat assessment.
In both cases, it was unclear that there was going to be a target for the marchers. Seattle PD had about 30 minutes more warning of where the protestors were headed.
I don’t think there’s any excuse for the difference in effectiveness here.