Protecting The Private Life

I have a "real" website now! Mostly for work, it details my publications and teaching history. Come check it out: samfletcher.work

The 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is, for many people, the best edition of D&D to date. Similar to previous editions, the various systems that make up the rules are separate enough that creating house rules is fairly painless, with the possibility for unforeseen ramifications kept to a minimum. The Dungeon Master's Guide is, in many ways, an enormous collection of house rules, ready to be used or ignored to meet the needs of each play group. These house rules go by the name of "Variant Rules" in the DMG. While a great system, 5e is not without its shortcomings. One common complaint is that despite Inspiration being a good mechanic, the rules for actually gaining Inspiration are far too vague for players to feel that they can reliably recoup it once they spend it. This leads to players simply sitting on their Inspiration until they're at risk of death, and the rules for gaining Inspiration slowly fade into the background, forgotten. And lets be honest ...

The Theory of Everything was released at the same time as The Imitation Game, and a cursory glance would make them look very similar – they’re both basically biographies of genius scientists, right? This assumption somewhat dampened my experience of The Theory of Everything, because it’s very much focused on being a love story, based on a book written by Hawking’s first wife. It does what it aims to do very well, but don’t watch it expecting the same sort of drama or themes as The Imitation Game. One thing that cannot go unmentioned is the acting, specifically Eddie Redmayne playing Hawking. The number of times I found myself thinking “Wait, this guy isn't actually disabled is he? He’s just pretending right?” was incredible. Watching him trying to pull his body up a flight of stairs with fingers that don’t work… It’s incredibly powerful stuff and there’s no doubt he deserves his Oscar nomination. As much as the movie succeeds in portraying Hawking’s relationship with his wife ...

While nobody expects Wes Anderson to use anything other than his iconic style, it’s a style done by nobody else, and it really shows you the infinite creative potential of film-making. Merely by being so different, it begs the question – why are all the other movies coming out these days just so damn “same-y”? Once you move past similar directors like Quentin Tarantino, why does everyone else seem to insist on just churning out the same style, movie after movie? The same color palette, the same editing techniques, the same narrative structure, the same camera angles, the same music; the list goes on. It’s a real shame. The Grand Budapest Hotel doesn't really need any praise beyond that. You’ll know within the first 5 minutes whether it’s a movie for you, but try not to be put off by the initial oddness. From start to finish, I kept saying to myself, “this is so weird ”. Never did I do so without grinning like a Cheshire cat though. It’s been a long time since I've had such a...

Exodus is the perfect example of a 5/10 movie. Nothing was particularly wrong with it, and nothing was particularly amazing about it. The main roadblock Ridley Scott and his writers had to overcome was the basic narrative – it’s literally a movie about a tonne of “God cards” being played. Similar to the plot device of deus ex machina (where a situation is magically saved by an unexpected/unlikely intervention of some kind), Exodus suffers from the main characters being powerless to affect almost anything at all throughout the movie. All the audience and the characters can do is watch as God brings down horrific events onto innocent people, one after the other. There’s no real struggle for the characters to undergo, or for the audience to invest in. This isn’t an unsolvable roadblock though, as Darren Aronofsky showed us with Noah * . The story of Noah is very similar in that it’s mostly about an unstoppable, horrific act of God (though admittedly not as bad as the story of Exod...

Interstellar is an interesting beast. It’s a movie of grand ideas squeezed as efficiently as possible into 3 hours. It’s a movie about space travel, but it’s also a movie about the human condition. Too big for its shoes? While watching the movie, I kept getting the niggling feeling that every scene had the edges shaved off, and was just slightly shorter than it really needed to be. Ideas were ever so slightly cut away from before finishing, perhaps missing a little bit of extra dialogue, or just some breathing room for the audience. It was never enough to cause problems, but the feeling never really went away that Nolan’s vision was slightly too big to fit into 3 hours. One specific situation that kept arising was the lack of establishing shots - it always seemed like we simply cut to the spaceship arriving at the next destination, without giving us a chance to see what the destination looked like from afar. When the destination is a black hole, that’s kind of a bummer. But again,...

Source: Google As my plane descended into Swedish territory, I couldn't have asked for better timing. Dawn had barely arrived, fog surrounding the thousands of islands littering the "coastline". It was difficult to tell where the sea stopped and rivers began, but one thing was for certain – the Swedes don’t lack trees. Dense forest stretched as far as I could see – which is quite a substantial distance when you're several kilometers off the ground. As the plane headed inland, quaint green fields started to break up the mass of trees. Classic bright red barns with pointed roofs suddenly called into question my assumption that they only existed in fairy tales. Clearly, my plane had been diverted to Narnia sometime in the night. Source: Google Source: Google As a bullet train (boasting 100% renewable energy, like there was any doubt) shot me from the airport towards Stockholm, Narnia slowly gave way to a modern cityscape. But not entirely modern – my p...