Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz do okay with what they had to work with. But ultimately, don't waste your time. There's better Apple Movies out there.

I guess writer/director/actor Jonah Hill thought he was being darkly funny. He'd have been better leaving it out and letting the core story come through. Even then it might have been a mess, but maybe salvagable with some editing.

'outcome' - Apple TVs film lambasting Hollywood crisis management. It's a sorry mess of a film. There's a good idea (a tour of apologizing and discovering the past of the beloved star) ruined by the Crisis management scenes. #outcome #moviereviews

Or golden hands. How fragile is the system to bad/good luck? How fragile is it to a sub-optimal decision on turn 1?

How fragile do you want it to be? Super robust systems can be boring and less expressive; but super fragile games can be frustrating to play if the games are long.

OR you discover the economics system you have in the game isn't going to support the design at the moment and needs some tweaking too.

In my opinion, nothing beats a lot of play testing at first. A play tests that go through the whole game, and play tests with set ups (like bad resources starts)

Wing it, play it, wing it again, revise and after a while you'll start to have heuristics for cost scaling. Like "all power 1 cards cost 0.75 at base, +/- secondary effects"

I think they opened last week. Had there schwarma. Was pretty tasty.

Very odd being in there, I spent many evenings playing board games when it was interactivity board game store.... So different inside!

It'd be a five star read but the finale makes sense but feels too short? Not satisfying? Just a little flat - though the journey to get there was worth every step of beautiful, thoughtful prose.

I'll be on to the next in the series soon.

#earthsea #leguin #books #fantasy #fiction

Tehanu is more of the "everyday" style than the last three - but reflects on power dynamics; the role of women in culture and finding the self separate from the power you have (or don't have).

The mirror between us and Earthsea is the strongest so far - I don't think Le Guin was trying to hide it

Finished the 4th book of Ursala Le Guin's Earthsea series on vacation - "Tehanu". All four books are different in their style, message and motifs, but all sit within the same world where magic is esoteric. They always reflect on the everyday folk too - even when the protagonists aren't.

New rule : if your development is called Lakeside, but I can't see the lake or walk to it without crossing a major highway, the developer should be fined.

#yyj #thetislakeside

... but it was short, fast paced and emotionally empty. Plus the title "One Last Lie" had nothing I could tell, to do with the plot.

There's 8 more in the series, about a governess who ends up solving crimes around the world. I won't be reading any of them.

#ai-novels #content-mills #books

Read, in advertently, either my first AI book or first ghost-writer-mill book "One Last Lie" by Blake Pierce. Blake has over 502 novels published in the last 5-6 years - almost all with a single female protagonist investigating a murder or other crime.

It was readable, and not -bad-... #ai-novels

As my wife pointed out, the writers changed in season 7 - and it shows. It's depressing - and had lost the snappy dialogue - and the characters are used in ways that feels less true to their central core than before.

It's not Scrubs Season 9 bad, but it's not good.

#gilmoregirls

The number of references to good music though is at an all time high (where good music is music I liked in the 90s). Got Sonic Youth blasting into my ear drums this afternoon. #sonicyouth #onthestereo

Season 7 of the Gilmore Girls is the saddest season - hardly any episode doesn't contain major downbeats for one or more of the main characters. Where'd the lighter dramedy go?

Cory Doctorow is in Victoria tomorrow night, doing a reading at Russell Books : www.russellbooks.com/cory-doctoro... - I have other plans, else I'd go. #yyj #book-readings #doctorow

Burger & Briggs has our first self-produced show coming up!!

"The Place You Gave Us” is cozy, reflective, intimate, and aims for beauty, honesty, and play.

www.eventbrite.com/e/the-place-...

#YYJ #YYJImprov #YYJEvents #VictoriaBC #YYJTheatre #YYJArts

I wonder if co-operative trick taking games like The Crew could work as a starting point for conflict/co-operation in a GM-less TTRPG?

Gloomhaven -could- be a TTRPG if you played heavily into the RPG elements more - but the story content is... weak and doesn't support character play too well. Some elements do give feedback for character choices, but its rare.

XP Hero is pretty slick, but underneath it all it's a tower RPG progression with very little input/output feedback.

And some false ads to encourage you to play what looks like rogue-like level-up/die/repeat system.

#freetoplay #mobilegames

Maybe that's a tactic - show increasingly bad ads to make me either pay for ad-skip or stop wasting their server space.

I will pay a few bucks for ad blocks on games I'm enjoying the main loop of. And if it looks like it's doing something a little different.

#freetoplaygames

I realize that the it's not the fault of 'XP Hero' what ads it serves, but it was enough friction to make me churn out of the game.

Hero XP is a RPG driven loot and explore game - with more than enough trackers and battle pass track mechanics to see how it was going to monetize me.

#xphero

There's a new "asmr" unscrew game that has some of the most gross graphics in it's ads - scabs, boils, worms, skin growths etc. I have no idea what any of that has to do with ASMR, or the screw-style game. I do know the ads made me uninstall the game I was playing that was showing it

#mobilegames

$10M in cash would be about 10 briefcases full of $100 bills (American or Canadian) - which is quite the volume to hide.

I'd mostly worry about it being accidentally found though.

Hide it, well enough that I can find out the detectives, then offer to go halfsies with one of them - they get 5M and no more effort.

Hiding it well enough will be tricky - depends how deep these detectives can get into tracking movements. But there are places around here I could hide stuff.

This is going to add to the chaos with the Bay Street Bridge also closed....

Oh jeez, it's "The Witness" - see your other thread about disconnection for ten years.

Plus I am not sure there's a food source on the island in the Witness either....

10 days, maybe, not 10 years :)