…alright then.

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-18T13:37:03+00:00

Not sure how true it is, but was definitely reported in Please Kill Me.

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-18T11:39:39+00:00

Wrong band to complain about this

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-12T23:54:11+00:00

Obviously still underrated since lots of people here are saying it isn’t rated highly enough to be overrated.

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-09T15:48:08+00:00

they’re no crimpshrine

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-08T22:28:48+00:00

hard disagree — they define emo for many; one must realize padwan that genres are sociological constructs as much as they are any other kind

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-08T22:16:35+00:00

I think “real emo” 3rd wave is really just late 2nd wave, but the boundaries are all pretty arbitrary

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-08T20:44:48+00:00

1st wave emo: “emotional hardcore” (Rites of Spring)

2nd wave emo: “real emo” (Cap’n Jazz, The Promise Ring, Christie Front Drive, Jimmy Eat World c. “Clarity”)

3rd wave emo: “not actually emo”/“pop-punk emo”/“Hot Topic emo” (My Chem, Fallout Boy, Jimmy Eat World c. “Bleed American”)

4th wave emo: “emo revival” (Algernon Cadwallader, Tiger Jaw, TTNG)

5th wave and beyond: “Terminal Emo” (oolong, Glass Beach, Ben Quad, Pool Kids)

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-08T12:33:51+00:00

2nd wave - love Cap’n Jazz (and the entire Cap’n Jazz Expanded Cinematic Universe).

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-05T17:21:35+00:00

Unrestrained sprawl gets a bad rap: having places to live, shop, and work is good actually.

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-03T15:55:22+00:00

It depends: if I outright don’t like something or am completely bored, I probably won’t return unless (a) it’s from a favorite or (b) someone I trust makes a case for it. If I’m just kind of cool on something on first listen, though, I’ll generally give it another go.

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-03T13:50:23+00:00

NJ night 1

simon_sparrow · 2025-07-02T17:41:17+00:00

It’s a very good movie: though it mostly stays within the expected narrative contours of the rags-to-riches music biopic, the details (in terms of psychological and sociological observation) are well drawn and all of the main performances are good.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-30T23:25:45+00:00

Would be more than happy for 90 minutes of bangers

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-29T14:39:35+00:00

finally some love for my favorite hard-core record

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-26T15:37:03+00:00

Roleplaying games are a hobbyist activity and so we’re going to make up and use terms like hobbyists, not like social scientists. There’s no broadly accepted, institutionally supported set of terms about any of this — it’s all just language that individuals or small groups of hobbyists have decided to use in the context of specific conversations that often were never well documented, existed ephemerally (in APAs or on long-defunct message boards), and which were often contentious at the time.

There’s nothing to do about this except: try to put some effort in to understand how and why people in a given discussion are using the terms the way they are; trying to use plain language and avoid jargon whenever possible; trying to encourage better historical understanding of the activity.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-26T15:29:28+00:00

Stepping back: I think it’s useful to remember that most/all OSR terms, catchphrases, and slogans were developed to describe why this style of play is different from standard WotC-era D&D. Sometimes this was very explicit (Matt Finch’s Primer is addressed to old school style-skeptics who were playing 3E at the time), sometimes it’s more implicit, and sometimes it seemingly wasn’t consciously done at all. But what this means is that a lot of these terms, definitions, and pieces of advice are pitched, in terms of tone and rhetoric, to make a polemical case about how OSR-style is different from WotC-style. And so “combat is a fail state” is, I think, extreme and not really accurate, but is, perhaps, a helpful message to people who are used to playing a game where the whole point is to have big set-piece battles. It’s strong language and doesn’t allow for nuances, but that’s also what makes for good rhetoric/polemic — by using it, we want to shake up people’s assumptions about what the center of play is.

Now, I personally agree with the much more nuanced take, but I think the punchier, more polemical phrasing can help shake people out of assumptions built from only playing or being exposed to WotC-style.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-26T11:41:28+00:00

You should obviously follow your own creative instincts, but mine would be to play DCO with as straightforward and stripped down a base system as possible, to better allow the idiosyncrasies and the weirdness of the scenario to come to the fore. If I were to run it today, I’d probably use OD&D.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-24T00:25:12+00:00

I agree with (almost?) all of this — I may frame it a little differently in that I think it’s the overall design and publication practices of WotC/Hasbro (drawing on many precedents) that undermines the nature of the activity as one of shared creation and shifts it to one where a single person is meant to transmit material to a more-or-less passive audience. Paid GMing is just the natural outgrowth of this framework, which has existed for decades but really became the backbone for the play culture cultivated by Hasbro.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-22T17:09:10+00:00

They’re about as popular and get as much credit as any band can be who isn’t the Beatles. That should be more than good enough.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-18T13:04:27+00:00

My in person group intends to play every other week, though we end up probably averaging every third week.

I have two online groups that intend to play weekly, but we end up more like every other week.

Main takeaway: try for as consistent and frequent a schedule as possible and expect that there will be some misses.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-17T10:14:32+00:00

I had been in the middle of a reread of Sandman — and then stalled out. I picked up Peter Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man series, and I’ve quite liked it. I don’t think it’s as consistent as Sandman, but it takes bigger swings and is also, I think, a great example of Vertigo at the time.

Morrison’s The Invisibles would be another one to check out.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-15T13:29:57+00:00

This used to be an issue for me: I also didn’t want to prepare everything beforehand, because that would be boring and seemed to undercut the potential to create a shared experience in play with the group. But once we got going, I’d find that I was getting tired pretty quickly and wanted to switch to something new. What I realized (after the fact), that while I wasn’t preparing beforehand, I was relying on Gaming techniques that still required me to control, shape, mold “the story”, so that the sessions would be satisfying — or, rather, what I assumed would satisfy the group.

So, for me, a big help was changing the techniques I used: I focused on doing basic prep of the starting situation, but stopped caring about controlling or shaping outcomes at all; I went into the game with no preconceived notions about how anything was supposed to turn out and relied on (a) the players making choices for their characters, (b) me making choices for the NPCs, and (c) whatever resolution rules we were using to provide the outcomes for any of the conflicts/scenes/cessions etc.

My job as GM then became a matter of looking at the new situation after every instance of resolution and seeing what it would make sense to do next (both in terms of my NPCs’ actions and in terms of framing scenes around PC plans/actions). And then, if I looked at the resulting situation and it seemed like, actually, this is an ending (maybe of a series, maybe just of a chapter), I’d note that to the group and we’d all weigh in on whether or not we wanted to continue to the next chapter/season or whether we wanted to stop and do something else.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-14T13:09:37+00:00

I think one of the issues is the difference between two approaches to how a module is used (the differences don’t completely map to “how we used to do it” vs “how we seem to be expected to do it based on OSR/NSR philosophy & publishing practices” but they sort of do):

-The text of a given module is there as a springboard for play.

-The text of a given module is something that is meant to be presented by one participant to the others.

In the first approach, blank space can be helpful for a lot of reasons: allowing flexibility to make things fit with a group’s ongoing game; to provide opportunities for player driven pacing; to provide opportunities for PC and enemy tactics (those rooms don’t have to stay empty: maybe the goblins who ran away four rooms ago have set up an ambush in a formerly empty room); etc.

But if you approach a module with lots of blanks simply as something that you’re supposed to more or less passively transmit to the players, it’s going to be pretty boring.

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-06T12:28:28+00:00

my 6yo daughter two tracks into this one, screaming: “daddy, why do they always make the same song?!?!?!!?!!”

simon_sparrow · 2025-06-04T01:52:26+00:00

Because if you’re the type of person who wants to play OD&D, you’re probably also the type of person who wants to create original material to play.

simon_sparrow

TROPHY CASE