Blackmoor Vituperative

Letting “Alligator” (1980) play while I work. I remember seeing this when I was 15 or 16 and thinking it was really funny. I’m only five minutes into it, but I feel so sad for the baby alligator. That’s true of pretty much any old movie I see that has real animals. I am a lot more sensitive to it now than I was when I was a kid. I have a hard time watching “Night Of The Lepus” (1972) nowadays.

I prefer fake-looking CGI animals over seeing real animals mistreated.

My very first RPG character was Dinara, a Chaotic Evil Magic User in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I repeatedly manipulated the other PCs into betraying and killing each other so they (and I) could get the dead PC’s stuff. Back then, we always started characters at 1st level, so after a while I had the highest level character by a significant margin.

Unfortunately, after the … fifth time, I think? … the other players must have compared notes, because at the beginning of the next game session, Dinara walked into the tavern, and all of the other PCs stood up from the table and drew their weapons.

“We need to have a talk,” one of them said.

“Fireball,” I replied.

That killed all but two of the other PCs, who then killed Dinara.

It was worth it.

Keep in mind that this was 1980, we were 15 (or maybe 14, now that I think of it), we were friends, we were all new to the game, and we were the only AD&D players we knew. Also, we weren’t as emotionally invested in our characters as everyone is now (including me). It was a game. Those of us with dead characters made up new ones and moved on. My next character was a Lawful Good Fighter.

While I was typing this, Susan asked if that experience taught me that playing a character like that was not a good thing to do. I said no: I have never played a PC like that again, but I have run a few NPCs like that in games I have GMd since then. But what I did learn is that you can only pull something like that once with a given group of players.

Winaero has a step-by-step tutorial on how to revert Firefox (more or less) to its pre-Proton user interface. I am giving it a try. I have been using Chrome as my default browser for the past day, and I like it better than Protonic Firefox, but not as much as pre-Protonic Firefox.

We watched a movie called “The Colony” (2021) last night. It was kind of like “Escape From New York” (1981), but without the bright colour palette and upbeat tone.

Today we watched a very interesting movie on Netflix DVD, “The Current War” (2017), about Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and (to a much lesser extent) Nikola Tesla. We enjoyed it.

If you get a chance to see “Nancy Drew And The Hidden Staircase” (2019), do. It’s cute and fun.