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There is an iOS app of the game, plays exactly like the card game. I enjoyed it a lot, but not quite enough to spring for the micro transactions to get the expansions. It wasn’t a terribly complicated game, but it was deep enough to reward replay and variable enough that replays didn’t get stale. Perfect for that niche of game you play when only two of your regular six-player D&D group can make it or you want to kill a half hour or so waiting for Bob to make the pizza run. (As a matter of fact, I think I’m going to reinstall the app...)

You can be a professional and be bad at your job. Just look at cable news.

Hinterland is a very niche sort of show. It’s a police procedural / film noir murder mystery series set in and around Aberystwyth (a small coastal town) and the surrounding rural county of Ceredigion (grey hills, grey rivers, grey sheep, and grey bogs) in northern Wales. It’s grey, it’s raining constantly, it’s grey, everyone’s got an impossible to pronounce name, it’s grey, and half the cast have an accent so thick you need a chainsaw to cut through it. My god, I love it so much. A few reviewers have compared it to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I kind of agree with. The plot is nothing at all similar and the characters are quite different, but in terms of tone it most definitely is. It’s film noir, but not... It’s a police procedural, but not... If you like moody, gloomy, noir murder mysteries and gorgeous sweeping cinematography of grey, dreary, and decaying rural farmhouses, you’ll love this show. Another interesting thing about the series is that it was filmed, simultaneously, as two separate shows: Hinterland, the version currently on Netflix, is filmed in English; Y Gwyll, which isn’t available in the U.S. near as I can figure, was filmed entirely in Welsh... With the same cast, same actors, same script, etc. British DVD box... Actual show not this colorful.

Generally speaking, I’ve always understood the distinction as “home brew” referring to amateur works and not work done by professionals. It’s a bit of a fuzzy distinction in publishing this day and age, with desktop publishing, print-on-demand, and a thriving “indie” scene. As a wargame T9A is a collaborative effort by people who aren’t industry professionals it gets even fuzzier. Since this is an industry that has always traditionally relied heavily on freelancers, spec work, and “two blokes in a shed who had a good idea.” But, I was mostly just making a joke.

Six Underground (2019) straight to Netflix release. Rolling Stone gave it one and a half stars, saying: I agree with them 100%, except I give the movie four stars. Roger Ebert used to say (paraphrasing) ‘It's not what the movie is about, it’s how it is about it.’ Meaning that a movie should be judged based on what that movie is trying to say, not against all of cinema as a whole. This is a Michael Bay movie, it’s trying to be a Michael Bay movie, and it’s very good at being a Michael Bay movie. Pops your popcorn, crack open a cold beer, and turn up the bass on your surround sound.

I had the name wrong, I was referring to Kanan Jarrus and not Ezra... In my defense, I’ve seen two episodes of Rebels.

“This is the Way.” Between recruitment of the 501st as extras, actual physical sets, practical or optical effects, a plot without a forced romance, minimal CGI, and using a Honest-to-Oz puppet for Baby Yoda... I sometimes wonder if Favreau and Filoni just based every production decision on the idea of doing everything 180° opposite of the prequel and sequel film trilogies...

Oh, it looks absolutely beautiful. It's just kind of blandly written.

Works for me.

Red Tails (2012) the last movie Lucasfilm made before being sold to the House of Skaven Mouse. Spent years in development hell and had trouble finding a distributor... and then fell short of its budget by about $8 million at the box office. Oof. Having finally gotten a chance to see it, I can see why it wasn’t a big hit. It’s not a bad film, not at all. The acting is great, the cinematography is gorgeous, the air combat action scenes are better choreographed than anything in the last six Star Wars... and need I really say anything about Lucasfilm and ILM’s sheer mastery of digital sorcery? The trouble with Red Tails is a combination of two things: First, the filmmakers were clearly set on making an "old school" war movie, a homage to classics like Flying Leathernecks or Twelve O’Clock High, but about the Tuskegee Airmen who never got (although they totally deserved) a classic WWII film. But in doing so, they embraced all the dated cliches and plot devices we’ve all seen in these movies – spoiler that isn’t a spoiler: the pilot who puts the photo of his new fiancé up in his cockpit doesn’t get a happy ending – making it just fall a bi flat emotionally. Secondly, I couldn’t shake the feeling the whole film that I was watching the second part of a trilogy or the third- and fourth-episodes of an eight part miniseries. Maybe I’ve been spoilt by things like Band of Brothers, The Pacific, or other more recent “prestige television” type presentations over the “old school” John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart fare... But character introductions and characterization was rushed, we don’t get anything about the Tuskegee Airmen’s formation or training, there’s no prologue, and we don’t even get much of an epilogue. It just kinda starts en media res and then ends the same way. Nevertheless, it’s a good film overall. Any fan of WWII films (and especially fans of WWII air combat films) will enjoy it and the Tuskegee Airmen are certainly deserving of a starring role... 2.4 outta 5, overall, but actually a lot better than that score implies if the classic WWII movie is your cup of tea.

I'm available most days from about 9:00 AM until 1:00 PM and most nights after 10:30 PM. Tuesday days being the exception.

All things being equal, I prefer neoprene... But these are pretty inexpensive, starting at $17.00 USD. If your looking for something like Blood Bowl, X-Wing, Red Skies, or Gaslands where you basically need something more “board-game board” than “base layer for terrain” than vinyl is probably fine. Would be a good source of “clubhouse mats” for WarCry, Kill Team, and Necromunda... assuming that the quality is decent.

Clearly this isn’t the fault of His Royal Highness Ben, Prince of Inator. It’s the fault of those dirty peasants in the levies... I’m sure our host had the cur soundly thrashed.

Mats by Mars has some nice looking designs, although I haven't seen them in the flesh, so caveat emptor. They're also based in Missouri, so shipping shouldn't be as bad as ordering from Poland.

Plywood, PVA glue, green flock, and brown paint, like the Lord God intended!

Technically speaking, isn’t the entirety of T9A home brew?

Irvin Kershner deserves a lot more credit than he is usually given as well.

To be fair, the original trilogy wasn’t a “Lucas envisioned trilogy” either.

Sounds far-fetched to me. I’m going to invoke Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Based on the rest of J.J. Abrams’ body of work, I strongly suspect he’s phenomenal at coming up with ideas, but distractible and lacking follow-through. He kinda reminds me of me honestly, I’ve got terabytes of half-finished campaign settings, adventure ideas, comic book scripts, even a screenplay. Not to mention enough half-painted miniatures to fill in the Grand Canyon... I call it “Gamer A.D.D.” and I think Abrams has it too. Only I’m working with $5 bucks worth of foam board and hot-glue from Hobby Lobby; He’s got $5 gajillion bucks and sound-stages on five continents. Abrams seems to be at his best when only doing ONE film or ONE season of a show. Not bigger, multi-year projects. They needed one screenwriter (or a screenwriting pair) to write all three films, they really needed a competent executive producer to over see it. They needed a Kevin Feige.

For obvious reasons, I'm really hoping that the T9A Nippon army gets bumped up to final status. I think they err'd a bit on the side of the Katanas are Magic! side of things (+1 Strength, +1 Offensive Skill, and +1 Armour Penetration in the first Round of Combat! WTF! They're just swords, people!) but I do like that they've come up with interesting ways of making a lot of other uniquely Japanese equipment work in the T9A paradigm, like sashimono, sode, and so forth. It's also nice that the army is designed along similar lines to WHFB's Empire or T9A's Empire of Sonnstahl in that you can play a pseudo-historical army with only "realistic" units, a high fantasy army full of oni and dragons, or a blend of the two.

I won’t be there Saturday, but come Tuesday, not only will my Enforcers be unpainted they won’t have heads! 😱 I ordered a bunch of conversion bitz from PuppetsWar but they’ve been stuck in customs or something.