Nice writeup! (Though Dave killed five of the six, not three of the four )

Anyway, I think I will actually have time on monday for a session, so if you guys are keen on it being weekly, I can do that!

Orphan Black season 3!
Allison is consistently the most joyfully entertaining aspect of Orphan Black. Don't get me wrong, I love the rest of the show and characters, but Allison/Donnie, Allison/Felix, Allison/whoever is the best. I genuinely would watch an Allison spin-off. For serious.

To be honest, I would also watch a spin-off which was nothing but Helena reviewing food.

God damn, Tatiana Maslany is so fucking good.

I liked it, it made me laugh. And it entertained me (I avoided every single trailer so that I could be surprised for once, ya know?).

You know what's interesting? All this talk of "he had to shoehorn in this and that and t'other" but really, it didn't really seem that way to me. Sure, there was the infinity-gem / mindstone but that was dealt with rather quickly, and what else was there?

I'm sure that between Joss and Marvel, there was a long laundry list of things that they wanted/needed to be in the movie, but since we knew that going in, I just kinda... corrected for that beforehand, so it didn't really bother me.

I do agree that Avengers 3 is gonna be astoundingly fucking hard to write and direct though. (In an ideal world, they'd let Shane Black do a 22 Jump Street on it, but I'm sure that only me and, like, four other people would enjoy that).

Every now and again I watch something so ridiculous that I am genuinely IMPRESSED by how bad it is. It is complete malarkey, but also completely hilarious malarkey, and I watched the whole thing with a stupid smirk on my face.

There’s a moment early on when the weird head tentacle thing sentences Stella to work on a penal colony, and I swear to god he reads the line as if someone had JUST stuck the script in his face and he’d never encountered the phrase “penal colony” before. AMAZING.

I know most movies shoot the movie out of order for various reasons, but Starcrash really seems like even within a short 30-second scene, they filmed it out of order. Also, oh man, I loved, LOVED the way that the reaction shots of every single person in this film were completely inappropriate. Especially Stella Star who reacts to everything by smiling and shaking her head as if she was remembering that time she set the DVR to record the wrong show.

Oh, and the movie soundtrack. Wow. Come on. Seriously? It sounded like an otherwise-talented horn section trying to play the Star Wars theme, but none of them realized that some dopey twat transcribed each line of sheet music the wrong way round. It’s like an uncanny valley for music.

And oh my god! There's a stop motion robot thing that looks like a C3P0 sex-doll trying to walk after getting royally munted on quaaludes.

This whole film is a bit like that, really. It’s got practical models, it’s got people reading words from a script who I suppose you could call actors, there’s makeup, costumes, camera angles, flashing things, a lot of matte-shots etc, but that doesn’t really make it a movie just by default. It’s like if you see a 3-year old walking around in Daddy’s business shoes and dragging a briefcase just ‘cause they think that’s the thing that makes Daddy a businessman. Except, instead of being adorable, the 3-year old in this analogy totters around until it slips over and bangs its head on the coffee table, and then instead of calling an ambulance, the parents start arguing about which is the best kind of baking soda to use to remove the blood from the carpet, and then the kid dies and there’s a tiny coffin at the funeral and it’s really quite tragic.

So um, yeah, Starcrash. This film is a hot mess. Get drunk and watch it!

SD, I've added you (apparently?) to google plus, so I think that should be fine?

Y'ALL.

What time Monday? So I know when to leave work.

Excellent. Thanks, ShadowDuelist, for taking the initiative

There's PDFs of the 5th edition rulebooks here. A 30-page quick-start guide, and also the proper 500 page one, though I expect that we'd only use the full one for reference, since I barely have time in my life to read 12-page journal articles from beginning-to-end. Although I dunno what the differences are, which edition would you suggest, ShadowDuelist?

I totally dig the idea of having tangible dicerolls, so I'm gonna go to my local Gamer's Vault and get some after work. Yay! 

Holy shit y'all... Alien Isolation. I am making so little progress every session and I LOVE it. The game just turns me into a paranoid, frantic, panicky mess. If you are a patient gamer, this is amazing.

I just had a moment where I hid in a locker so I could compose myself. I check the motion tracker, but a man and woman patrolling 10 feet away on the other side of a wall hear the beeps (my bad). They walk into my section of the corridor and start looking for me. The woman looks into the locker I'm in, so I lean back and hold my breath (in-game). The man is killed out-of-sight by the xenomorph attracted to the noise. I'm startled so I stop holding my breath, and the woman hears me. She starts shooting me through the locker, then opens the door and shoots me again. I die, but the last thing I see is the xenomorph darting across my screen and knocking her out of frame.

It's a testament to the game mechanics and careful thought that went into it, that that was ungoddamnscripted. Amazing!

edit: motion tracker beeping: a cautionary tale

It can easily go less though. I know I've said this before, but Harmontown used to do (now they do Shadowrun) a weekly segment of live D'n'D that would last under an hour, but is still plenty of time for action and a bit of exploring. I think a 3 hour slot would be reasonable and fruitful. Besides, most of the appeal for me is that this seems like something that would be fun and most importantly, social, so I'm not worried about how much progress we make in a session as long as everyone's enjoying it

Heh, the BioShock games are the entire reason that the term ludonarrative dissonance was coined!

edit: also, I wasn't gonna get Alien: Isolation 'cause I didn't think my laptop could run it, but for 20 bucks I figured it was worth a shot. and hoorah, it works! as a big big fan of the first two films, the production/level design is utterly astounding. played for about an hour so far, haven't encountered the xenomorph yet (but i can hear it scurrying around) but fuckdamnit it's still goddamn scary. if y'all don't hear from me after this post, i have had a heart attack, so please consider opening a Herc Memorial Library in my honour.

I've seen Evil Dead 2, but I don't remember seeing the original, so I'm up for this.
I'll see if I can come up with an efficient and manageable way to link some kind of publicly-editable document (since I'm sure we're fine with the honour-system here) and a random-number generator, too.