HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING (Forum Shout Out Thread Thing)

[trinite]

BUY MY WIFE'S ALBUM!
https://oliviacordray.bandcamp.com/album/the-juniper-tree

[CADmonkey]

This popped up on one of the Architectural blogs that I follow:

Take a Virtual "Fly-Through" of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon With This 3D Model

Pretty decent little Architectural walk-through tool, you can check the Falcon out in real time in plan, bird's-eye & walk-through modes, and it has a camera tool (which I didn't try).  Plus, it has "Customize" tools, which let me do this:













Whatta ya think?

[CADmonkey]

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a>

If John Ford’s acclaimed 1956 film The Searchers is a western, then it only makes sense to call this one a northern. Drawing loosely on the same story of a man in pursuit of kidnappers, Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) sets his story of vengeance in the frozen Far North.

The film gets off to a deliberately slow start, as Aulla (Jonah Qunaq) and his small band of malcontents are told to leave an Inuit gathering. The four men are looking for wives, and when they come upon a small family group they kidnap a woman (Jocelyne Immaroitok) and her daughter, and kill the others. When the woman’s husband, Kuanana (Benjamin Kunuk), and son return from a caribou hunt and see what has happened, they set off in pursuit on dogsleds.

As much ethnography as drama, Maliglutit – the title translates as ‘searchers’ – spends a good deal of time illustrating the customs and rhythms of the Inuit. We see them tending fire, preparing food, building shelters and managing their dogs. The timeframe is never specified, but a few lanterns, a spyglass and, crucially, a rifle with only a few bullets, place this story sometime after European contact. It might even be 1868, the same year that Ford’s film unspools, 4000 kilometres to the south.

Certainly there are parallels in the cinematography, including one shot of ice-covered rocks that looks like Arizona’s Monument Valley if it were given a liberal coat of vanilla frosting. Kunuk also delivers a powerful mix of close-ups and wide shots, the latter sometimes so vast that the human figures in them are reduced to mere specks in an otherwise tranquil and indifferent landscape.

But this is not a remake. Where Ford’s film examined tensions between the First Nations and European settlers, Kunuk’s is strictly about the Inuit – though like all good stories, it is instantly relatable to viewers of any ethnicity. Kuanana receives a loon totem that he hopes will help guide him to the kidnappers, and the ghostly call of the bird mixes with a sparse, spooky score that sometimes includes human voices, as if spirits were howling or panting along with the music.

The effect is dreamlike, with long stretches of gorgeous northern tundra interrupted by bursts of action. Kunuk has created another timeless fable of the Far North; a simple struggle played out on a vast canvas.

– Chris Knight, The National Post

[Adam_Autist]

site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/cthulhu-city/

Cthulhu City: a new setting for Trail of Cthulhu

[CADmonkey]

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a>

Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro has a ‘written by James Baldwin’ credit in its opening sequence. At first this seems like a polite tip of the hat to the author, essayist and public intellectual who died nearly 30 years ago. Soon we realize this is an accurate statement of fact. Each line of the narration that permeates the film is taken directly from one of Baldwin’s texts or letters. His words dominate the archival clips as well.

It in no way diminishes Peck’s work as a filmmaker to suggest that Baldwin’s ideas and personality are the author of this movie. It is a striking work of storytelling. By assembling the scattered images and historical clips suggested by Baldwin’s writing, I Am Not Your Negro is a cinematic séance, and one of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made.

During the final years of his life, Baldwin was researching a book he planned to call Remember This House. It would profile three assassinated civil rights leaders: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He intended it to be a personal work, as he knew each of these men, and telling their stories would likely be a springboard to tell his own story at a more advanced age. Beginning with Baldwin’s pitch to his agent, we link to touch points with the slain men, hopping through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s personal essays with his public statements.

Peck occasionally takes advantage of some of Baldwin’s more prophetic passages to flash-forward through time. Images from Ferguson, the Obama inauguration and the dross of daytime tv aren’t make us realize the timelessness of his greater arguments. Baldwin did much of his best writing about America while living as an expatriate, and this outsider’s perspective (shared by Peck, who is from Haiti) brings with it a tremendous amount of clarity. I Am Not Your Negro’s specifics are only intermittent, like reporting on different reactions between white and black audiences during Sidney Poitier films. By and large this film concerns itself with the greater philosophy of why groups in power behave the way they do. This might be the only movie about race relations I’ve ever seen that adequately explains – with sympathy – the root causes of a complacent white American mindset. And it took a black writer and director to do it.

The narration is done by Samuel L Jackson, and it’s one of the best things he’s done in years, a true performance. We live at a time when almost every notable person from the 20th century has a documentary about them streaming somewhere. That’s all well and good if they are about someone whose work you fancy. I Am Not Your Negroisn’t a special interest title, it is a film.

– Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian

[CADmonkey]

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a>

The story of one of German history’s almost forgotten figures is told in a rousing new film from Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director of Downfall. Georg Elser (Christian Friedel) was a carpenter who, in 1939, came within minutes of killing Adolf Hitler with a home-made bomb. The bomb went off after Hitler left a hall. Several bystanders were killed in the blast.

Hirschbiegel and his screenwriters have come up with an ingenious narrative structure. The bomb blast comes at the beginning of the film; then, Elser is interrogated and tortured, and we are whisked back to when and why he built his bomb as he recounts the tale under extreme duress.

The film plays like a rustic folk tale. Elser is portrayed by Friedel as a strong-willed, good-natured country carpenter, appalled by the Nazi intimidation that reaches into his corner of Swabian Germany. He is having an affair with a married woman (Katharina Schüttler), whose boorish husband’s behaviour encapsulates the vindictiveness of the National Socialists. Some of the torture scenes are very uncomfortable to watch, but Elser remains defiant in the face of extreme suffering

Elser’s story isn’t especially well known outside Germany but many set-pieces – the bombing, the village feasts, the grim sequences of Nazis humiliating townsfolk – seem familiar from newsreels and war movies. The film boasts handsome production values and is as intricately put together as the device Elser so painstakingly assembles.

– Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

[Adam_Autist]

So... Posthuman just announced Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition.

[Twisting H]

Osprey has a new post-apocalyptic miniature skirmish game out today called Scrappers

https://ospreypublishing.com/scrappers

Back Cover Text

More than 150 years have passed since the apocalypse that nearly destroyed the Earth. Today, the planet is a torn remnant of its former glory, ravaged by nuclear fallout and mutagens. New lifeforms - Mutants and Synthetics - challenge True Humanity for dominance, while warring factions compete for survival and supremacy, and all must carve out their place in this brutal landscape, or else perish as billions before them. Scrappers is skirmish miniatures game set in the wastelands, where players assemble Scrapper Crews and send them out to scavenge scraps of Ancient technology and battle rival factions. Explorers, cultists and raiders clash with mutated creatures, robotic soldiers and embittered True Humans in this wargame of salvage and survival in the ruins of the future.

$30 for the hardcover book ($18 for the epubs) but you can use any miniatures in their system.

Here is how to make a Warband from a reviewer

http://anatolisgameroom.blogspot.se/2017/02/scrappers-review.html

Building warbands

Should you stick to the setting of the game, you are presented with a couple of choices for your warband. There are seven factions in the world to pick for your warband, each faction can pick from/or is restricted to one, two or three of the existing life form types, True Human/Mutant/Synthetic.

For instance, the faction called "The Purge" can only have members that are true humans, the "Gamma lords" is a faction purely made up of mutants, while factions like the Ectopians, Architects and Freelancers can mix life forms from of all types in their warband. Each life form type has its own list of traits that make up the basic special rules of a character.

True humans have evolved to be much smarter and have survival instincts, they can re-roll failed gear checks and are harder to kill.

Mutant life forms can re-roll dice on the trauma table after each game if they have been wounded, they ignore some radiation and the mutants are divided into 3 sub-categories providing extra bonuses depending on which type of mutant you create.

Synthetic life forms are immune to gas and poison, can ignore target priority restrictions and also have 3 sub-categories of troops that all have their own bonuses such as being able to carry more weight.

Before you can start playing you have to build your warband. You pick a faction to your liking that comes with its limitations regarding what kind of characters/lifeforms you can recruit. You get your base traits depending on the lifeforms you have recruited. Then you have to give your characters stats which are divided into Combat, Command and Constitution. You can also buy extra traits for your troops, and these are divided into generic and lifeform dependant, there are quite a bunch of traits to pick from for each lifeform type so you can tailor your gang to your liking. There are also a handful of faction specific traits exclusive to the faction you are playing.

[Twisting H]

From Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/6hfmrh/lovecraft_manga_adaptation_by_gou_tanabe/

Gou Tanabe has been putting some Lovecraft stories to Manga form for the past few years, he's got a collection coming out in July in English containing The Hound, The Temple, and The Nameless City. He's also done The Outsider, Haunter in the Dark, and The Color out of Space, and he's currently doing Into the Mountains of Madness. So far there isn't any word on whether we'll see those translated to English. I've put some of the images from the manga into an album below.

http://imgur.com/a/LsQCd

[clockworkjoe]

From Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/6hfmrh/lovecraft_manga_adaptation_by_gou_tanabe/

Gou Tanabe has been putting some Lovecraft stories to Manga form for the past few years, he's got a collection coming out in July in English containing The Hound, The Temple, and The Nameless City. He's also done The Outsider, Haunter in the Dark, and The Color out of Space, and he's currently doing Into the Mountains of Madness. So far there isn't any word on whether we'll see those translated to English. I've put some of the images from the manga into an album below.

http://imgur.com/a/LsQCd

holy shit that's awesome

[CADmonkey]

Ana Lily Amirpour's second feature is in theatres, I cannot wait:

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a>

In a dystopian future United States, a young girl (Suki Waterhouse) condemned to wander a desert wasteland is captured by a community of cannibals. Managing to escape, the girl later encounters and befriends one of her former captors (Jason Momoa, Game of Thrones) — but will the two of them be able to avoid getting slaughtered in this world where savagery is central to survival? Ana Lily Amirpour's highly anticipated follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night uses genre conventions as a springboard for high style and social commentary.

[trinite]

From Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/6hfmrh/lovecraft_manga_adaptation_by_gou_tanabe/

Gou Tanabe has been putting some Lovecraft stories to Manga form for the past few years, he's got a collection coming out in July in English containing The Hound, The Temple, and The Nameless City. He's also done The Outsider, Haunter in the Dark, and The Color out of Space, and he's currently doing Into the Mountains of Madness. So far there isn't any word on whether we'll see those translated to English. I've put some of the images from the manga into an album below.

Wow, those are friggin' great!
http://imgur.com/a/LsQCd

[Twisting H]

Yellow King RPG kickstarted by Pelgrane Press NOW

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1721105501/the-yellow-king-roleplaying-game-from-robin-d-laws?ref=nav_search

http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/announcing-the-yellow-king-rpg/

Written and designed by GUMSHOE master Robin D. Laws, YKRPG takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines.

Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ influential cycle of short stories, it pits the characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. This suppressed play, once read, invites madness or a visit from its titular character, an alien ruler intent on invading and remolding our world into a colony of their planet, Carcosa.

Four books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront your players with an epic journey into reality horror:

Belle Epoque Paris, where a printed version of the dread play is first published. Players portray American art students in its absinthe-soaked world, navigating the Parisian demimonde and investigating mysteries involving gargoyles, vampires, and decadent alien royalty.

The Wars, an alternate reality in which the players take on the role of soldiers bogged down in the great European conflict of 1947. While trying to stay alive on an eerie, shifting battlefield, they investigate supernatural mysteries generated by the occult machinations of the Yellow King and his rebellious daughters.

Aftermath, set later in the same reality, in 2017 North America. A bloody insurrection has toppled a dictatorial regime loyal to Carcosa. Players become former partisans adjusting to ordinary life, trying to build a just society from the ashes of civil war. But not all of the monsters have been thoroughly banished—and like it or not, they’re the ones with the skills to hunt them and finish them off.

This is Normal Now. In the 2017 we know, albeit one subtly permeated by supernatural beings and maddening reality shifts, ordinary people band together, slowly realizing that they are the key to ending a menace spanning eras and realities.

[CADmonkey]

In The Mixed Six, Caleb was talking about earnest outsider art versus campy, ironic works and I remembered this:

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a>

The actor John Lurie made a 6-episode fishing show with Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe & Dennis Hopper as guests.  It's absurd, ironic, winking at the camera, but I love it.  Tom Waits dropping a fish down his pants is one of the highlights of the show.  In the DVD liner notes Lurie claims that the entire show was a tax dodge, and maybe it was?  Thought it seems hard to believe you could recoup the cost of filming in locations like Jamaica, Costa Rica and Thailand solely through the use of tax shelters.

[Gorkamorka]

...Jamaica, Costa Rica and Thailand solely through the use of tax shelters.

 

"Hey guys lets go on holiday to Jamaica, Costa Rica and Thailand and then write it of as a loss and get lower taxes as a result"