Top Hat Sasquatch

Terri looked like the type of movie I was going to really like. It’s a quirky story of an introverted, overweight High School student befriending his assistant principal, played by John C. Reilly. Oh, and Creed Bratton from The Office is in it. Yeah, this looked like my kind of movie.

Well, after seeing the amazing Win Win recently, I can’t help but feel like Terri was just ok, and not great like I was hoping it would be. That’s not to say I didn’t like it or it was a bad film, I just had higher hopes for it.

The Movie

Terri is played by new-comer Jacob Wysocki, and he totally embodies the character, who lives at home with his aging, eccentric, this-is-probably-what-Creed-Bratton-is-like-in-real-life uncle James.. He starts wearing his pajamas to school because they’re comfortable, but his poor attendance force him into some one-on-one time with John C. Reilly’s character, Mr. Fitzgerald.
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This is a good week for Batman fans. Like most of you I’ve been playing through Batman Arkham City and loving every minute of it, but this week saw the release of the animated adaption of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One as well.

Has it really been over a year since I reviewed a DC Animated Universe movie? The last DC U animated Blu-ray I reviewed was Batman: Under the Red Hood, and it was surprisingly good. Since then, I’ve seen a few more, but didn’t feel they were worth posting on the site. Green Lantern: Emerald Knights was a decent collection of stories, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse was just kind of interesting, and All-Star Superman was weird because I didn’t know the source material.

Even though I haven’t read Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, I thoroughly enjoyed the animated adaptation and feel like it is an impressive addition to Batman’s already awesome animated film history.
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Here’s proof that everything is done better with 8-bit graphics and chiptunes. Witness this “Fox Retro” video created by production company PUNGA. It reimagines classic ’80s TV shows like Happy Days, Diff’rent Strokes, and The A-Team as lo-res video game graphics. They get mashed up with the likes of Pac-Man, Galaga and Donkey Kong.

Via Laughing Squid

It’s just a teaser—in the grandest sense of the word—but the new trailer for next year’s The Avengers movie has dropped. Perhaps the biggest highlight is the glimpse of this Hulk iteration. It’s too quick to make judgment but it certainly looks promising.

The whole Joss Whedon-directed film has a ton of promise, actually. These are all heroes we’ve come to know on the big screen in recent years. Rather than spending one-third of the film with exposition and origin stories, we can expect fistful after fistful of action.

Who wants to get in line now for the May 4 opening?

(Unintended hilarity for your third or fourth viewing of the trailer: at the 0:50 mark, pretend that’s a Scarlett Johansson fart leading to the explosion.)

Previously: Post #2 in our Google+ D&D Experiment

It’s been a very educational week in the land of Google+.  We’ve learned quite a bit about running a campaign within the G+ infrastructure.  Some good lessons, some bad.   Let’s get to it!

The One Where Google Hates Me

Last time I told you about the use of custom hashtags to help separate your D&D posts from your animated .gifs of cats.  They still work great…if you remember to use them.  Sometimes in the heat of an adventure it’s very easy to forget to add your hashtag to a post, meaning it can easily get lost among all the other posts or if players only use the saved search to find the latest game posts.  As I suggested before, if you could create an exclusive Circle, where the only posts that would appear in that Circle were meant for that Circle alone, then we’d be in business.  Sadly, Google developers are not hanging on my every word yet, so that feature hasn’t made it into the latest round of updates.

So, I thought of another solution to this problem: Have everyone create a separate G+ profile only for D&D.  I doubt you could use your character name – I’m sure the folks at Google would recognize “Rothar the Destroyer of Worlds and Lover of Puppies” as a fictitious name – but there are plenty of ways you could come up with a name that would pass inspection.  This would allow you to create a campaign Circle and then every post would be game-related.  You could even create multiple campaign Circles if you’re a hardcore player.  Although if you have a friend that is playing in more than one campaign with you, his/her posts will show up in both campaign Circles, so it’s not a perfect solution, either.  However, if you’re only playing one campaign at a time, or you play with completely separate groups of people, this would be a pretty good way to do things.  But if you get caught by the Google Detectives for having a fake profile, leave my name out of it.

It’s All About the Story

My method for telling the story in a G+ campaign has been to have the DM start every thread.  I usually start a new thread whenever we change locations, which means my descriptive text serves as a sort of anchor.  If you’re familiar at all with writing movie scripts, it’s like putting the scene indicator (SCENE VI: Ext – Daytime) at the top of a scene.  Under that, the players post about what they’re doing, including attacking an enemy or attempting to pick the lock on a door.  This allows them to maintain a constant context of where they are, what they’re doing, and it’s easy for them to scroll back through previous posts to see what’s in the room that might be useful.  This is a great way to play, but, as I’ll point out later, is not without its flaws.

As you can see in the screen shot below, there are 21 comments on this post, so quite a bit happened in this room (We had our first encounter!  And no one died!  Well, except for a zombie…) before I posted a new thread after a player decided to go through Door #3.
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