What is Best in Life

So it’s not something I normally talk about on such a google searcheable site–even though I seem to have no problems filling my webpage full of Lord of the Rings fanfiction and essays about Magic the Gathering.  Anyway, aside from LARPing, this thing I don’t normally talk about is kind of the nerdiest thing you can do, and discussing it in public only makes it worse.  I’m speaking, of course, about Dungeons & Dragons and “role playing games” in general.

However, if there is one thing that will get a nerd to open up and tell the internet how they really feel, it’s when they feel the need to nerd rant about something.  And right now I feel the need to nerd rant about the newest edition of Dungeons & Dragons, D&D 4.0.  But first let’s start with a bit about what I like about “role playing games” in order to better understand the areas in which I feel that D&D 4.0 is a failure. (more…)

I’ve had issues with “cute” dialog in movies for a while.  I almost turned off Juno after ten minutes and even the dialog from someone like Oscar Wilde can begin to annoy me.  So I have some possibly unfair prejudices in this area (Juno-trashing might be acceptable, but I suppose there isn’t anything wrong with enjoying Wilde’s witheringly witty wordplay).  Still, when a film is full of dialog that serves no purpose other than to “sound cool” I tend to have some issues with it.  And since Quentin Tarantino is currently getting  my cinematic dander up with his dialog I thought I’d write a bit about the thin line between clever and insipid when it comes to film dialog. (more…)

Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again!  On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!

What’s that you say?  Do I really get that much mail?  Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site.  And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question.  So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site.  I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!

Anyway, since the majority of the “queries” in my “reader mail” relate to the phrase “That’s what she said”, I thought I’d take this special Labor Day Mailbag Monday to sort through my increasing backlog of these important questions in an EXTRA LONG  (10 letters instead of 5 this week) TWSS edition of Mailbag Monday! (more…)

Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in August.

Stats

• Movies watched - 41
• Movies that were new to me - 33 
• New record for movies watched in a single day - 7
• Monthly Masterpieces – Les Diaboliques, The 39 Steps, Footlight Parade, She Done Him Wrong, The End of St. Petersburg, Love Me Tonight,  The Children of Paradise 

(more…)