A review at Ars Technica starts this way: “Dungeons & Dragons just celebrated its 42nd birthday…”. I said no, no way, this is a mistake, it can’t be — I started playing that game the year after it came out, in 1975, which was…41 years ago. Yikes.

I played regularly through college — we had a kind of loose gaming group who would get together every week or two for a long night of goofy fantasy role playing. I drifted away after graduation, though, for two reasons: I’d moved far away from old friends, and they kept tinkering with the game, adding new persnickety rules and turning it into an exercise in bookkeeping rather than storytelling.

The review explains, though, that the latest edition goes back to its roots, simplifying and streamlining the rules, which I think is a step in the right direction, even if I’ll probably never play it again (I now live even farther away from my old friends). I think it’s also cool that they’ve made the basic player’s rules available for free, even if they’re going to still stick the dedicated D&D gamer with an $85 bill for three books, the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and of course, the Monster Manual (D&D Core Rulebook).

So all I need is money, and time, and friends, and I could pretend to be 18 again. Now that’s real fantasy role-playing!

I was wrong. If you skipped the Superbowl, you would have missed Beyoncé. And Coldplay. But Beyoncé is the only one that counts.

That woman really knows how to resonate.

I have all the important stuff right here. Here’s the game:

And here are the commercials:

Now I’m going back to grading.

Maybe it’s the cocktail. I could do with one right now, even if it is 7:30am.

I failed you all. I went to a movie and told you I liked it, and you were all shocked and horrified. But I can now compensate for that. I saw another movie, and I hated it.

It was The Revenant.

[Read more…]

In some ways, it’s a shame that language is organic and evolves, because it means you really can’t roll back pronunciation to an earlier state. It’s still interesting to hear, though, and here’s a story about an effort to reconstruct the pronunciation of Shakespearean English.

The accompanying article explains some of the difficulties and ambiguities in trying to work out the way language was spoken — some are saying it would have sounded more like American English, others talk about Scots/Irish accents. In my ignorance, I’m going to lobby for a more Northern Minnesota version of Shakespearean English. I want to hear MacBeth in those Fargo accents.

Mallory Ortberg has re-written scenes from Firefly as if authored by Ayn Rand.

This abomination must never be made.

One small grace we are given: at least she didn’t include any Randian sex scenes.

This thread is for general discussions of arts, crafts, music, movies and hobbies. Caine is your curator.

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I will read to them from this wonderful children’s book.

My children weren’t scarred too badly by my upbringing, I don’t think. Although it is true I haven’t seen much of them over the years…