Movies reviewed this week: Gunpowder Milkshake.

Movies reviewed this week: F9.

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 (original). NPR has a detailed timeline of the Capitol coup attempt; Aaron Rupar’s tweets (original) 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 (original): Crowd starts moving 7:11 PM: march stopped at police line, 11th and Pine [roughly a 25 minute walk from Westlake Park] ...

I wrote this up with vague plans to run a Season of it at some point, and I liked it enough to publish it. This is designed for use with The World Wide Wrestling RPG, second edition.