Derik Badman's Journal

A long weekend means it's Monday and I don't really know what to do.

Played a second session of Mausritter yesterday, which as always seemed to go really slow. Had to use the rules more which forced me to... use the rules... and try to figure out how to handle situations that the rules don't cover (quite a lot in such a rules light system). I tried to err on the side of "yes, you can do that", with a side of "but..." I think it's easy to get in the mindset of making things difficult or a challenge or add some element of chance, when really, you don't need that. The game continues on regardless and people (theoretically at least) have fun. We had some combat which was good for seeing a bit how to handle opponents and how tough they should be, definitely made the leader of the bandit group the party was dealing with a bit too easy. But also it kept combat really short, and I think started to lend itself to a little more descriptive action. I like the simpler rules a lot. I need to query the players on how they feel about it, now that we've used them a bit more.

I watched Claire Denis' Let the Sunshine In this morning, and... feel pretty ho-hum about it. It stars Juliette Binoche (again) as a middle aged painter divorcee trying to find love. I think on the whole her real issue is that almost all the guys in the movies were real douche-y. Not really anything else to say about it, it just didn't grab me. Had a weird ending where she goes to some kind of psychic and he talks to her for a long time as the credits roll. I was amused in one scene, she grabs this large framed photo in her studio. It's a picture of a woman among some paintings, also one assumes in her studio. My brain immediately thought "that's Joan Mitchell" (who my wife loves, so I'm sure I've seen photos of her in books or at shows we've seen of her work). A pretty quick image search found the photo and I was right.

Been watching a bunch of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, seasons 3 and now 4. They are good as partial attention background, while cooking or doing puzzles or something. At times it feels like all the characters are too well defined ahead of time. There are rarely any surprises about how anyone acts. I do think this is something that keeps the writers and audience engaged with Data the android, as they consistently play around with him and his search for humanity and emotions. This allows him to be a lot more dynamic over time than everyone else.