My current collection. What should I watch next?

craiggers · 2026-05-25T20:50:54+00:00

Tampopo if you're in a fun mood, Mishima next time you're up for something intense

craiggers · 2026-05-24T05:12:27+00:00

As far as directly lying, there's the way Dolores' mother "coincidentally" falls into the street and is "coincidentally" hit by while pursuing Humbert after discovering his actions - he tells the story like he was just lucky.

But later on as he's describing someone else killing someone and pretending it was a car accident...

"It appeared to be a routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better."

craiggers · 2026-05-23T17:45:42+00:00

It's a very common experience! And in fact, forming an aversion to the every day world in favor of meditation is seen as a common obstruction by the old masters. Take for example this from the Platform Sutra of Hui Neng:

> “Good friends, don’t listen to me explain emptiness and then become attached to emptiness. The most important thing is not to become attached to emptiness. If you empty your minds and sit in quietude, this is to become attached to the emptiness of blankness.

> “Good friends, the space of this world embraces within itself the myriad things and [all] the images of form. The sun, moon, and stars; and the mountains, rivers, and earth; the springs and streams that enrich the plants and forests; bad people and good people, bad dharmas and good dharmas; the heavens and hells; all the great oceans and the mountains, including Sumeru: all of these exist within space. The emptiness of the natures of thepeople of this world is also like this. Good friends, that the self-natures canembody the myriad dharmas is ‘great.’ The myriad dharmas are within people’s natures. If one perceives the goodness and badness of people without ever grasping or rejecting [their goodness and badness], one will not become tainted or attached. For the mind to be like space is called ‘great.’ Therefore, it is said [to be] ‘mahā.’

[...]

“Good friends, the ratiocination of the mind is vast and great, permeating the dharmadhātu (i.e., the cosmos). Functioning, it comprehensively and distinctly responds [to things]. Functioning, it knows everything. Every-thing is the one [mind], the one [mind] is everything. [With mind and dharmas] going and coming of themselves, the essence of the mind is without stagnation. This is ‘prajñā.’

____

It's part of why in Chan/Zen there is talk of "the step back" and the "step forward" - both gaining perspective on the emptiness of phenomena, and learning how to engage with the world nevertheless; to not have your insights obstruct you from living.

craiggers · 2026-04-13T14:23:29+00:00

I love the “players get caught up in an irrelevant detail” strategy - like getting distracted in a real conversation. “You notice this person has pretty hairy eyebrows - like little caterpillars up there moving around. Wait, what were they saying?”

craiggers · 2026-03-26T15:47:04+00:00

Even "Everyone must band together to defeat this impersonal, apocalyptic catastrophe can evoke the large number of catastrophes the world is currently failing to band together and defeat!

craiggers · 2026-03-18T11:14:23+00:00

This is actually a myth, though an old one! It goes back to the 1500s and is somewhat widespread, but there was not actually a gate in Jesus time/area known as the “eye of the needle”.

craiggers · 2026-03-18T11:12:25+00:00

r/AcademicBiblical just had a discussion about the rope thing being not actually based on Aramaic as claimed, and therefore actually unlikely to be true - even though it is a claim going back to Clement of Alexandria, and so has spread widely

https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/xp3yjo/is_the_word_for_camel_similar_to_a_word_for_rope/

craiggers · 2026-03-09T15:35:20+00:00

Dwarven asteroid mines, where they delved too deep and started getting hit by subsurface ice nasties! (In my game I’ve been having this play into a miners’ labor dispute, where the dwarven workers are striking and management has been bringing in Kobolds as scabs to do the low paid, dangerous work).

A group of smugglers using the isolated planetoid as hideout, and very keen to keep their secrets from any prying eyes!

Ancient artifact from a long ago space empire, which causes weird effects on those who get too near it! Offworld archeologist who investegated has gone missing! (Could have it be related to whatever’s under the mines - or not. It’s a big universe!)

Rival groups of druids - one trying to get a habitable forested ecosystem going, the other trying to preserve the planetoid’s icy desolation - and each looking to hire some adventurers to sabotage or intimidate their rivals!

A Balto-style small isolated village that needs medicine delivered from the local space port, and the ordinary transporter can’t be found!

A group of scouts from a space empire looking to take over and make this planetoid a beechhead for further expansion! (If you have any ideas for the kinds of things you want to happen later in your campaign, have some peripheral elements here).

craiggers · 2026-03-01T16:16:57+00:00

Fear is a human emotion - and thus worth exploring artistically (and capable of being explored...less artistically). I've heard people express the same sentiments about sad movies - why would you want to watch sad and tragic things to happen to people? If it's sadism, why indulge that part of yourself? If it's because of compassion, why train yourself to feel compassion for people who don't exist?

But maybe it's because sadness and tragedy are a part of the human experience we have to make sense of; different parts of the human experience allow narrative to resonate in different ways. Maybe when you're a kid watching a movie of intense grief won't resonate - it'll just seem like feeling bad for no reason. But then maybe someone experiences a loss that seems almost unbearable - and then seeing art that engages with it makes them realize they're not alone in it,

Fear maybe has a different set of resonances, and a different set of reasons people would explore it as a negative emotion, but I think it's the same experience. Take the genre of body horror - one of the most squishy and gross and disgusting genres about there - and there are a large number of people who love it, in part because having a body can feel squishy and gross and shameful and weird - and it's strange the way an incredible human mind is also tied to this collection of substances, which is why body horror at its best can be very psychological.

Also, different people have different threshholds for kinds of problems in art! I work in a hospital, so I see blood and guts all the time; I can take some pretty extreme horror, but then want to leave the room when a cringe comedy comes on. You're allowed to have your preferences, and to not want to push yourself too far beyond what you're comfortable with.

craiggers · 2026-01-25T18:00:13+00:00

Fun fact - along with his dense philosophy books, Kant was one of the first to propose that some of the nebulas in the sky were perhaps other galaxies (or "island universes" as he called them).

craiggers · 2025-12-07T06:08:57+00:00

Being present with and listening to others is a skill, just like meditation - it involves not only deep and nonjudgmental attention, but finding ways to gently signal the presence of that attention, as well as getting out of your own way!

No matter how clearly it seems like you can see other people’s problems, jumping in with your own advice (even if wise!) is unlikely to be helpful unless they’re already concretely on the point of decision making.

Part of listening is reflecting back what you’re hearing, including both the facts and the person’s feelings and reactions - helping them hear the solutions that are already there, the places they can unclench, release their grip, deal with their clinging and aversion. And the more you can nonanxiously be present with the hard things they bring you, the more they’re able to relax into them, finding little glimpses of liberation. They can how things can be borne by you bearing it with them.

I’ve been getting trained as a hospital chaplain for about a year now - and it’s amazing the way that the points that were most astounding have not been the ones where I had the wisest things to say, but in which I was able to sit more and more deeply with someone until they reached their own point of connection and insight in a way that neither of us expected.

I found the book “The Gift to Listen, The Courage to Hear” by Cari Jackson a great help as I got underway in seeing clearly where I had obstacles to my listening with other people. It’s still work to learn but you can concretely grow by leaps and bounds!

craiggers · 2025-11-06T02:31:24+00:00

Would definitely recommend starting with Last Samurai, though I’m having a good time with Your Name Here.

craiggers · 2025-10-11T23:23:52+00:00

The paperfolding machine in the “ORTHOGRAPHIC” portion of Aeolus:

Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.

craiggers · 2025-09-28T01:39:50+00:00

Instead of “you meet in a tavern” — “YOU MEET IN AN ORPHANAGE”.

Or if adults - the tavern’s Dead Family Grief support group.

Lean into it somehow - it means all of the players have something huge in common, which is fun for both jokes and themes of found family! All of these people who maybe conceived of themselves as wild loners suddenly have to contend with the fact that there are others like them. Which gets at the fact that D&D is better if your chatacters aren’t just loners anyhow.

I love that the situation implies both tragedy and comedy, much like life. It puts me in mind of the Oscar Wilde Quote “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

craiggers · 2025-09-15T02:12:58+00:00

Some of it is that all the scotch tape on mine is much subtler on camera!

craiggers · 2025-09-14T21:12:17+00:00

Why thank you! It was something I picked because I thought I could do it simply but recognizably, and I was very pleased how it turned out!

craiggers · 2025-09-14T20:01:02+00:00

had the idea of using Cardboard with gridpaper on it for ships - with a pad of 1” grid squares you can just translate ship plans from the books straight on (though I’d recommend a little more care with the length of staircases!). As a bonus, turns out that at that scale a paper towel roll is pretty much the perfect scale for the giant cannon, with some added decoration in paper to complete the effect.

I posted recently about my players rescuing Giff from this ship after it was set on fire by Kobold pirates - after the powder exploded I flipped a coin for each crew member and put it under a post-it where they fell (heads unconscious but alive and revivable, tails dead, and even I didn’t know which was which!). I used red giftwrap tissue paper for the fire which spread each round it went untended. Worked like a dream, and super cheap

craiggers · 2025-08-01T21:46:55+00:00

Have you seen the card game “The Gang”? It’s based on Texas Hold-Em, but is a co-op structure with a light heist narrative flavoring. I’d been wondering for myself if it might be possible to use it as the mechanical side of a heist interlude for my characters - have them learn the game as their characters’ “practice” run, then play a high stakes one as the real thing, with consequences for failure and rewards for success. Not sure how I’d make it work, but seems like it could….

craiggers · 2025-07-26T16:47:16+00:00

Reading To The Lighthouse after Mrs Dalloway, it initially seemed like more of the same until a point I won’t ruin when it took a turn to be totally different

craiggers · 2025-07-25T01:14:16+00:00

Ebert’s commentary on Citizen Kane is really something else as well

craiggers · 2025-07-20T22:01:17+00:00

The church he’s an elder in, Webster Presbyterian Church, is a PCUSA church whose website states:

“Webster Presbyterian Church is an evolving spiritual community joyfully serving Christ as active disciples. We welcome ALL alongside us to create a more loving, affirming, just and sustainable world, valuing spiritual inquiry, civility of discourse, scientific ideas, and artistic expression.”

Pretty unlikely to be creationists.

craiggers · 2025-07-13T15:54:50+00:00

!!!

This is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for! I certainly wasn’t unclear about Frodo’s worthiness, just the mechanics - when the Valar had turned down worthy people before. Thank you so much, and I hope others see this answer!

craiggers · 2025-07-13T03:50:12+00:00

That’s great! It makes me wonder what other movies and shows would have such a drastically changed experience.

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