2020-11-29 09:07
Many many months later I finally watched Parasite, and I think it was pretty overrated. I liked it a lot at first, it was funny and interesting, and then it got into this whole tense murder drama thing and it felt like two or three movies jammed together into one. For all the hype it got for portrayal of social class, it was very weak and banal on the matter. Sure, poor people and rich people... but... at worst the rich people were just naive and self-centered. I think there could have been an interesting (and funny) movie in there about a poor family who lies their way into taking over this rich family and exploiting them, but this was not it.
My NaNovellaWriMo has fallen completely by the wayside for the past few days, despite me having a bunch of days off. It's almost like I'm worse at getting things done when I'm not working, but I think it's more that I just need the break and then by the time I'm ready to start getting more done it's time to go back to work.
Still playing too much Assassin's Creed: Valhalla which I am really enjoying. It's, of course, as did the previous one, give me this whole rpg campaign idea about the players being vikings settling in 9th-10th century England. There could be a whole element of building up your settlement and people and alliances, but also exploration of the land and its people. Ancient roman ruins, druidic nature spririts, Christian demons, there would be plenty of room for fantasy elements mixed with the historical elements.
I've been reading various things about this whole "Free Kriegsspiel" style of gaming, which goes back to pre-D&D game playing, wherein the rules are non-existent or extremely light. The referee just arbitrates based on narrative world. Having no rules or dice rolling seems a little too much for me (and I'm sure the rest of the group), but I like very much the idea of stripping the rules and rolls back really far. The most fun parts of our games are not where we end up rolling lots of dice and using lots of rules (and in 5e especially looking things up), but where we just get to interact. And yes the randomness of success/failure when rolling dice adds drama and the unexpected, at times we end up using them too much for narrative moments that have no drama or are a given success anyway. I guess we'll see if I can go anywhere with that when our current 5e campaign finished up, which could be a long time from now anyway.