Matthew Supert

I was having some thoughts the other day that coalesced around this idea of the "Wild World" and this concept of the unknown. It's a fairly common trope in most fantasy worlds that the world is portrayed as an untamed and dangerous place. Bastions of civilization are focused around a handful of cities and alcoves. I alway found the concept of the regarding the world as we know it and how its relates to our fantasy narratives as very interesting.  

In most fantasy narratives it is implied, if not explicitly stated, that the world is mostly uninhabited. There are pockets of dense populations, often times reflected in larger cities, but generally speaking, when your heroes or adventurers are out wandering the world, they are wandering into the unknown, into the wild. Even the established routes between known population areas are portrayed as dangerous. 

I suppose there is a sense of wonder in breaking away from our now common familiarity of travel. We can easily travel fifty miles without much of a thought with modern transportation and, there is little of the unknown wilderness still to traverse in that travel. Of course one has to be careful and not fall into the colonial concepts of barbarians or uncivilized peoples and portraying those as "lesser". T

Bringing this back to our own world though, it really made me think about what the 19th century and earlier must've looked like to most people. Even into the 1800's there were wide swaths of the world that were largely unexplored and you can see this reflected in all sorts of artwork. It triggers a bit of romanticism does it not? To think about our own world and imagine it more wild, one that is perhaps less populated and full of new places to discover. Would such a world be a better place if we brought modern (western) sensibilities to it? Who is to say, but it is fund to imagine. 

Megan and I saw Dune Part 2 a couple of weekends ago in iMax. It has been years I think since we last went to a movie at the theaters. Probably since before COVID if I had to guess. 

The movie was quite good and I really enjoyed the movie experience. As with any movie adaptation there are some changes from the book and I fully understand how those changes needed to be made. In the movie version there appears to be a much larger emphasis on the Bene Gesserit and their role in the whole prophecy. I would've liked to see a bit more of the space guild and the mentat, if only to highlight a bit how there were more forces as play in the whole galactic politics. 

My only other gripe with the movie that jumped out at me was the handling of Chani's relationship with Paul at the end. In the book she was much more aware of the potential political marriage that needed to occur and stayed with Paul. The movie changed this dynamic quite a bit, apparently having the two split up and bringing forth the conflict between Paul's religious war and the longterm identity of Dune itself. 

It's an interesting take. I got the impression from the books series that the Freeman wanted Dune to become green. The movie portrayed this a bit differently for me, and I got the impression that there is a sector of the Freeman who want to be free, but have Dune remain as it is due to their "heritage". I feel Chani would fall into this camp. The movie conveyed a real sense of dread and devastation. The scene where the Emperor's ship is attacked on the Dune surface was a demonstration of a brutal and devastating blow. 

I had a great time though and despite the hight cost of going to the movies, I would like to get out a bit more and go back. The past few years of movies have not aught me at all. As I posted about earlier this year, I am getting a bit burned out on streaming services and subscriptions all over the place. It was nice to get into that whole movie experience, with the popcorn and everything. Here's to the hope that movies can make a bigger impact as we move forward. 

https://thegameawards.com/

The 14th annual Video Game Awards (VGA) were on this past Thursday and I have probably watched this show every year for the past eight years or so. It is the only award show that I regularly look forward to and it really is a testament to Geoff Keighley who has organized and promoted this thing since its inception. 

I think there is something important about how the VGA's are approaching the  award show space that really sets them apart from many of the other shows out there. No one is watching the Oscars or Grammys right? They are boring as all hell. The Grammy's if anything should probably be pretty easy to make entertaining considering it is a music focused show, but the format is just straight up boring. 

The VGA's have nailed it though in creating an entertaining show and they have done it by leveraging the value of the entertainment format. It is an awards show first and foremost, but they do an excellent job of getting away from the endless monologue of "thank you" speeches. I think for all of the awards that they gave out on Thursday, maybe 5-8 people actually came up on stage to say thank you. They even had some of the awards given out at an off-stage camera position and it appeared as if the awardees there read from a teleprompter for their thank you speech to keep it nice and short. The worst part of the Oscars is the endless droning of thank you's that no one cares about from the actors, made worse often by their self inflated philanthropic or political posturing. No one cares and it isn't entertaining for anyone. 

The VGA's also do a really nice job of featuring some important awards on the show that others do not. For example, they do an award for accessibility in gaming, which is something that others need to be doing. Even if the Oscars are doing something like that, they aren't putting that on the screen. 

The VGA's fill most of their time though with trailers for upcoming games, which is the real reason why most people come to watch. They also then fill it in with some excellent musical performances from some of the best soundtracks of the year. The Oscars should be doing this exact same thing. Musical performances, seem like a no brainer, but trailers? That also seems like an easy win of self promotion for all involved. Show us trailers for new movies coming out the next year. Better yet, remember all of that cool and fun bonus content that we got on DVD's back in the day? Give us that content for all of the nominees. That stuff is largely gone as a result of online streaming and some of that stuff is great. That would be an easy way to fill in a show with entertaining information that ranges from a technical/artistic insight to simple outtakes and bloopers. People would love to watch that. 

Late into the Halloween game, but I wanted to share this adventure I wrote a few years ago and have consolidated into a proper document for other DM's to run. This takes H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon short story and turns it into an investigation adventure. 

I hope you enjoy. 

Updated: 10/09/2023 - Updated to fix grammar, typos, and some formatting issues. Improved newspaper layout for easier printing. 

If you are not in the tabletop gaming world, you may not have heard about the controversy surrounding Dungeons & Dragons for the past couple of weeks. In short, Hasbro, who owns Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), who make D&D had leaked an update to their gaming license that would've imposted some severe restrictions upon content creators, 3rd party publishers and pretty much anyone who did anything creative within the D&D world. What is/was known as the Open Gaming License 1.0a (OGL) has been around for around 20 years. This licenses allows content creators to create content in and around D&D without imposing upon WOTC's copyright or trademark. For example, you wouldn't be able to call your book a D&D book, but you could say something along the lines of "it is 5e compatible and has these new monsters I created". 

This all got into a big mess when WOTC had their new OGL leaked. There were many problems with it, but most notably it appeared to revoke the previous license, implied that WOTC could claim the rights to creator's work and required creators making more than $750,000 annually to pay ~25% royalty. It was a shit show to put it mildly. 

Gizmodo broke the story and it put the fandom into a maelstrom as WOTC failed to repond. When they finally did, nearly two weeks later,  the community was not pleased. 

As result, multiple companies in the TTRPG industry have now struck out on their own to avoid any potential issues like this in the future. The backlash to WOTC has been so strong and so swift that they have essentially now created more competition in the market against themselves. Kobold Press has announced that they are making their own RPG system, code named Project Black Flag, which will likely be a 5e compatible system (aka 5.5). MCDM productions announced their new system and Paizo has announced they are leading and effort with multiple other publishers to create a truly open gaming license to be called ORC that can be applied to any gaming license. 

On top of that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cory Doctrow have chimed in with numerous other sites detailing how the original OGL was not even needed and how it even restricted some rights which might be inherent. 

In the end it has been quite a disaster. 

At this point I don't intend to stop playing D&D, but I think this might be an opportune time for our group to take a look at some other RPG systems and try those out for 2023. Paizo has put many of their books one sale this week to encourage some different play. 

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While folding laundry this morning I had a minor epiphany that subsequently lead to a resigned sigh. (The picture by the way doesn't really have anything to do with this post beyond the observation that the ends of this towel have apparently shrunk). For those that know me, you know that I absolutely dread folding the laundry. It is like the bane of my existence and despite all that I found myself folding laundry this morning quite contently, in addition to doing some other minor house chores. 

For the past week I have been off work on holiday and despite the sort of rush of the holiday and family, and friends, I mentally finally have had a chance to sort of catch up with the rest of my life. I even had a chance to enjoy some Netflix, even work on some music. The whole "Fight or Flight" rush of my life had an opportunity to just simmer down and I didn't feel like I had a mountain of horses and other personal items backing up, or at least I didn't feel like I had an urgency to get those things done before the week ended. And I think because of that I was able to fold some laundry today, for an hour or so and not feel any stress about it at all. I didn't have anything else specifically on my list that needed to get done. 

With the end of the holiday looming and work coming back up tomorrow though I can feel the sense of anxiety already begin to creep into the back of my mind. Right off the bat I have a meeting tomorrow morning to kick the year off. 

Everyone knows about the Roe vs. Wade decision which was overturned yesterday by now. There is a planned parenthood/abortion clinic near my house that we routinely drive by if Megan and I are doing errands or grabbing a bit to eat at Panera. Without fail there are protestors out in front of it. Even today, in the rain, after the largest anti-abortion victory in fifty years, they were out there again protesting. 

Ironically, I came across this video on TikTok this morning and while I don't normally like this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric, I do feel like it aptly sums up what I seem to observe. 

As I continued to drive home in the rain, it really got me thinking about the why and my mind drifted for some reason to philosophy. I have mentioned on here before who I studied political theory as my undergrad degree and there is a lot of overlap to philosophy there. Without a doubt those courses changed my entire outlook on the world and me as a person, and I grew and learned more from those courses than anything else I have ever taken. STEM has been such a large push in our world the past 20 years or so, and it just makes me think that perhaps instead of reinforcing the productive, output-driven focus of STEM education if we all might just be a little bit better off if we have some art, philosophy and music eduction to slow everything down. To teach people some contemplation an insight. 

You know, in Dungeons and Dragons there are two fundamental mechanics for using your brain to solve problems. Intelligence and Wisdom. We've really been pushing that intelligence part pretty hard with STEM learning. Perhaps we need to take some time and give the Wisdom score a little bit of love.

Several years ago I posted some reading ideas for those who may want to get into Political Theory, and by proxy some philosophy. I'll re-link that post here: Matt's Reading Suggestions for Political Theory. 

Additionally, this seems to be a nice list to start for many people, although any 1-2 of these will probably suffice as an introduction: 15 Best Philosophy Books for Beginners (Introductory Books to Start With)

So my latest ADHD obsession right now is watches. I've pretty much always worn a watch in some fashion or another all the way back to high school, may be even junior high. Nothing fancy. A Fossil typically. The most recent iteration happens to be an Apple Watch, which I have had for maybe four years now. I am noticing though that I am not really utilizing all that many smart features on it and it is basically a fancy heart rate monitor. Now, don't get me wrong. I still love that and being able to track all my health data all the time is fascinating, but I feel like I want to start to get into the watch game a bit more. 

James Bond was always a favorite character growing up and of course he has quite the watch game. It wasn't until last year that I realized how expensive some watches are though. Omega has always been a brand that seems to have caught my eye, but it wasn't until this past fall when I decided to look up how much an Omega Speedster costs. It is somewhere around $4,000, which if I am being honest is incomprehensibly expensive. I don't think I can justify that much money on a watch, but I suppose I would be willing to pay a few hundred dollars for one. After all I paid ~$350 for my Apple Watch. 

Citizen Eco-Drive Titanium

The Citizen Eco-Drive Super Titanium has caught my eye. I think in general any watch that doesn't require a battery seems appealing as I can just sort of pop it on and go. The titanium color matches my wedding ring too and I think the style of this watch has a nice look that can be dressed up or dressed down. 

Timex North Field Post Solar

Timex really catches my eye as well, especially their field watches. The Field Post Solar has that nice rugged look which I really like with the fabric band. Although I can't say that I really like how it loops. Perhaps the leather band would be the best way to go, and I have never owned a leather banded watch. It seems like it has a nice simple and clean look. 

There are a few others that catch my eye as well. Some are dreams and some are something perhaps worth looking at more closely. 

• Tissot Gentlemen Powermatic
• Jack Mason Solar
• Omega Speedmaster

I don't watch a lot of sports, but it just so happened that this weekend there are two sporting events that I wanted to catch. The Wimbledon finals and also the Euro championship game. I watched the women's final yesterday afternoon on standard broadcast TV, NBC. I got up this morning, having a free day due to a rained out motorcycle ride and popped on NBC expecting to see the men's final broadcast. 

Was it on TV? No it wasn't. Bummer, but not the end of the world. I'll just pop on over to watch the Tour de France. Ohh, you know what, that isn't on broadcast TV either. That is playing on NBCSports network. The Euro championship this afternoon? That is on ESPN. What a nightmare. Wimbledon used to be aired on NBC's main broadcast channel for years and add to that, so was the Tour de France. All three networks were local news and your standard "Meet the Press" Sunday political shows. 

So, I went to dig around and figure out how I could stream these shows today. First off, there is no way I can see of just buying them pay-per-view style or subscribing to just a specific network. I have used SlingTV in the past but unfortunately their NBCSports and ESPN channels are on two different packages (Blue vs Orange). What? Come on guys. 

Knowing that the Olympics are coming up in a couple of weeks I always want to try and watch that as much as possible when it is on. Again, NBC is dropping the ball here and they only plan to broadcast the Olympics during primetime. 3-4 hours a night of just gymnastics and he occasional track and field match is embarrassing. Why would they not fill up their standard daytime programming with Olympic coverage? 

So I spent a good portion of this morning, browsing my options and I ended up getting a temporary subscription for Youtube TV. It is expensive, $65 but it includes ESPN, NBCSports and has the olympic channel. It also thankfully is a month to month subscription so I can cancel as soon as the olympics are over.