The (Maybe) Refreshingly Different Perspective of The Monk and the Gun

Let me start with an admission: I don’t know anything about Bhutanese politics, so I can’t really tell you how accurate this is. My understanding of the history of Bhutan is on the Wikipedia level, so accurate, but surface-level. One thing to note here is that the country did not become a full democracy but instead moved from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy. What has happened after the events of the movie is that last year Bhutan was removed from the UN list of least developed countries.

And is this “refreshingly different”? The more I think about it the less I’m sure about this.

Continue reading

I Wasn’t Planning on Writing About Kneecap, But Its Been a Week and I’m Still Thinking About It

I don’t usually go out and watch biographies of musicians, because they tend to be so formulaic. In this case, I didn’t know its a real rap group, so I guess that kind of saved this for me. The movie actually makes fun of formulaic movies straight from the start. It begins with archive footage from the Troubles, including burning cars and unruly mobs (although I don’t want to disbarrage the people fighting for their freedom), but the narrator just stops that and tells us that every Irish movie that references the Troubles in any way always starts like this, but their story doesn’t.

Continue reading

My Top 10 Favorite Movies Directed by Famous Actors

After seeing a couple great movies directed by people better known as actors, I started to think about this. How often does it really happen? There’s plenty of actors who have tried their hand at directing, such as Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp and Bill Paxton, to mixed results, but one would think there are benefits to coming up through the acting pipeline.

Continue reading

Ideas for Using Generative Artificial Intelligence for Your RPG

First, it’s fine not to use them. I mean, I’ve done pretty well for decades without one, so how much is it going to help if I start using them now? Not much. Images would be helpful, because I can’t really draw, but I’ve always been very disappointed with the results from image generators. Video generators are worse.

The prompts used to make this video were:

  • Two geeks playing Magic the Gathering
  • Player on the right goes to the attack step.
  • A judge comes over and stops the game.
  • The judge adds counters to a card.
  • The player on the left disputes the judge’s decision and wants the head judge.

So, below I’m going to be talking about where they can actually be helpful.

Continue reading