1662 Mystery Dungeon.

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There’s never been a good D&D branded movie, sadly. The one they made years ago is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, although I concede that some people like it because people are capable of loving broken things, and that’s fine. I’ve staked my life on that very principle. Still, it’s a shame that there hasn’t ever really been a good, pure, D&D based movie. I understand there was some animation at one point, but it’s hardly memorable, or someone would have shown me. The best terrible thing to come from D&D as far as other media goes is the cartoon, which I’ve spoken about, at length many times. If you’re too young to remember it look up a few episodes. The first one in particular because it has such a 80s cartoon setup.

Side note, there’s a fetish porn comic that totally ripped characters off from that show called Slimey Thief, or Slime Thief, depending on when you find it. If you like giant magical boobs go find it. If not… then don’t do that. Pretty much the only character lifted right from the cartoon is Presto the mage, or wizard… I forget the nomenclature they used in the show. Magician maybe? Doesn’t matter. Its just a thing I happen to know because I’m a pervert.

I fucked up my arm somehow and it has left my left middle finger numb on one side, and part of the tip, for a few days now. It’s incredibly annoying and has really shown me just how much I use my left hand to do tons of things. I think it might possibly have something to do with the last time they drew blood from me because the lady clearly fucked it all up and the spot where she stuck me has been sore for way longer than normal. I suppose it could be a little carpal tunnel too, but I’ve gone so long with it never being an issue it seems odd to me that it suddenly would.

Honestly I haven’t been eating very well on top of everything else and it’s really starting to get to me. I really am a case study on how a single man will die much faster than one who has a mate.

Additionally I really need to have my eyes examined, but when I went to do it the place had just lost its doctor. So I have to wait again. It would have been so convenient, but no… I think between my allergies and not blinking enough my eyes are starting to deteriorate more than they might have otherwise. Winter is an all too brief rest from the worst of my allergies and this year it barely happened at all. I’ve had several days already of barely maintaining my sanity from my reactions.

I also think the clutch is going out on my truck. That would be a real disaster. Having to replace it will be a regular disaster, but getting stuck someplace would be… practically unbearable. So I absolutely need to get that dealt with the next time i have access to another vehicle. The Teen’s one is something but she’s practically moved out of the house at this point, so who knows how long it will be around after it gets its tags.

In case you were wondering The Teen has been making a series of questionable life choices now that she’s 18. The first signs of the dumpster fire that may become her life are beginning to glow. We did what we could and now all that’s left is the crying. My family has vowed not to enable her the way we did with her father, since that turned out so badly. Maybe going the other way will save her from a completely destroyed life. But it’s all a fucking crap shoot, so whatever. I guess we’ll see. No one will be happier than me if I’m completely wrong about what she’s choosing to do with herself. My path looks like the activity of a crazy person too if you look at it on paper, but it’s all that has even come close to working for me. Everyone has to find their own ways to cope with this thing called life.

I recently met some really nice people online and that has made me feel less isolated that I have in a while. Of course it seems like for every one good thing that happens there’s two shit things, but again that’s just life. I guess. Maybe it’s statistics, or karma, or random fucking chance.

I was going to order a new mask for my cpap, but fuuuuuuck. they are so expensive. I know I have some links someplace that people sent me, but I just browsed on amazon a little because I didn’t want to use the phone ordering thing that came in the mail. I hate places that don’t have a good online interface. I want to look at stuff. I really want to try some stuff instead of buying blind, but I still have to wait till fucking June for that… If I last that long at the rate I’m going.

My birthday is this month. A year later and I still haven’t had time to finish the fucking anniversary poster. Not that anyone is begging for it or anything. At this point it’s just for my own sanity after spending so much commissioning the fucking thing… Guh.

If I could just lose enough weight to be healthy I could save so much money and do so much more stuff. Since I don’t drink or smoke I would be in really good shape health wise for someone my age. Easy food is always garbage and I don’t have time or money enough for constantly buying and fucking with non processed food. Eating healthy really is a luxury, but it would actually be better for everyone if processed food was expensive and fresh stuff was cheap. because that would cut down on doctor costs for everyone, and lower insurance rates and all kinds of stuff. (I’ve got all kinds of crazy theories about this shit now…)

I really hate this time of year because my allergies make me jittery and nervous. It affects everything. Even though I have my own room pretty well sealed off the dogs track in so much pollen and dirt it’s insane. They’ve all learned to roll in dirt from Dorothy, who was a stray for a while, so now it’s 5 dogs just bringing in pounds of dirt every day. I vacuumed earlier and when they came in you couldn’t tell I’d done anything, so I did it again! Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

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There is a good D&D movie that is awesome simply because of how bad it is.

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising

It is fully aware of exactly how awful it is, and takes the opportunity to have some fun with it, turning it right around to become hilarious.

“Hide behind the mound of dead bards!”

that line alone makes it intriguing…

That’s actually the sequel. The original was simply The Gamers, and is also tongue-in-cheek humorous which lampshades many gamer geek stereotypes and presents an uproarious experience.

The phrase ‘backstab with a ballista’ is used with all seriousness at one point. It also deals with such things as what happens when someone’s character dies off, both good and bad.

There’s also a third movie that they did. In the third, they basically lampshade Shadowrun. In the most amusing way.

The third in the Gamer series was based around Magic card game or more specifically Legend of the Five Rings cad game. The Shadowrun short was a stand-alone. At least for now.

Hollywood has yet to succeed at good D&D adaptions. The internet took it upon themselves to do it, instead. There is an entire web series called Journey made from the same people who did Gamers and Gamers: Dorkness Rising. There are multiple groups recording their D&D sessions and turning it into fun videos.

There’s one group that’s been playing Rifts for fricking ever. Hundreds of hours of content about their characters moving through a post-apocalyptic Sci-fi/Magic world.

Though it is not true for all of them, I’d say some of their greatest success comes from the moments out of character that really humanize the story and elements within the game. Some have entire plotlines out of character, like both Gamers movie. Others don’t script anything at all so you get to hear these players just talk and debate and enjoy themselves. Some don’t script anything either but edit their videos for immersion, yet still leave in everyone’s laughter and jokes because the game is about humor more then drama.

Truly we live in a world where D&D no longer wallows in the basement. It now thrives online.

Hollywood has yet to do a good D&D movie because they have yet to take such a project seriously. It’s a problem with sci-fi and fantasy in general as well as other spectacle-heavy genres like action.

The rules for what makes a good or bad film don’t change as the quantity of spfx goes up, but you’d never know it from Hollywood. It’s a strange blind spot for a place so known for its affinity with imagination.

Given this attitude, it’s amazing that any of the Marvel movies are actually decent films, let alone the fact that some are genuinely good.

That’s totally true. Dorkness Rising is great as is JourneyQuest (my favorite!). Unicorn City was also fun if you can find it. The Guild isn’t exactly D&D (at all…) but it suits me fine.

Man. I’m sorry to hear about your health stuff, Jackie. ^ ^;

In my view, the only film that is like a D + D film, is probably the 1983 film: Krull.

Krull is definitely a B-movie, but- If you go into the film, thinking that it’s something like [a knights + armor + swords film, written by the 1970s + 1980s James Bond film guys], then you’ll probably think that the film is fun + OK.
…Hm. Yeah. If you’re afraid of big, big spiders, then Krull probably isn’t the film for you.

Their are cheap foods that are also healthy, something I’ve researched a reasonable amount having a lower income than I’d like and trying to get in better shape myself.

Milk, eggs, Greek yogurt (make sure it’s actual Greek yogurt not regular yogurt with a greek name), cottage cheese are all super healthy as well as easy.

Protein powder tastes awful but a container lasts a good while and food prep doesn’t get much easier than stirring.

Costco carries a high protein pancake mix that is on the low end of difficulty and you can make several days worth at once and reheat them.

Aside from the pancakes most of these options don’t taste great but cheap, healthy, lazy and good tasting is a lot to ask. Also worth grabbing a couple days worth of fruit when you’re at the store, might not always have fruit but you can buy the amount you’ll eat before it spoils. Or just buy frozen fruit or freeze fresh fruit.

Meat unfortunately costs a bit more but their are some fairly lazy ways to cook it if you don’t like screwing around. Parmesan cheese or oatmeal can bind hamburger into a nice meatloaf.

Hope some of this was helpful to you. Your options get tastier if you’re willing to put more effort or money into healthy eating but if you can stomach bland food you do have some options.

Also dark chocolate isn’t the healthiest thing but it does wonders to calm sugar cravings even in small amounts. Orange juice and baker’s chocolate chips are the only sugar I keep in my house nowadays.

Something I did a lot as a student was to boil a pot of white or brown rice and then stir fry a bag of frozen veggies, maybe add a fried egg. Not as easy as microwave, but a fairly cheap and healthy (and infinitely variable) meal.

Quick, lazy, and relatively healthy dinner options:

Meat + Sauce + Rice/Noddles = Stir Fry. This is the same basic concept as Hamburger Helper, but cheaper and FAR less sodium, if you get the right sauces. Using Rice helps reduce your carbs and gluten intake, you also have veggie-based noodles, but those can get pricey. You can use pasta if you like, but your carbs are gonna go way up.

Alternately, Meat + Dressing + Salad makes for an excellent meal. If you want it on the go, wrap it in a tortilla. Use a lowfat dressing or something like a vinaigrette to keep it healthy.

Pre-cook your meats, package in sauce, store in ziplock bag in freezer. When you want meal, pull out ziplock, start rice, thaw, mix, serve. Or thaw, pour over salad. Very simple and elegant.

I always felt that the movie that best depicted D&D was Conan the Destroyer. He has an adventuring party and everything, even if Conan does get way more of the spotlight than anyone else (it would be weird if that wasn’t the case I suppose).

Conan the barbarian was a better movie with a better villain and a better story, but I agree, destroyer had a more “adventuring party” feel

I would argue that Kubo and the Two Strings is probably the best D&D movie ever made.

It has a daunting quest for magical items, random encounters, a group of various creatures of different classes forming an adventuring party and one of the only examples in all of cinema of a magic using Bard.

I just watched that movie. I really liked it, but I didn’t really see it as a D & D theme movie, more of a typical Japanese child hero overcomes the bad monsters movie, but I can see where you are coming from.

The second D&D movie was a good bad movie, if only because it captured all the wooden acting of a bunch of amateurs around a table and was written by someone who liked to see player characters suffer. The cleric even had the standard problem of his whole personality being “hello, I am a cleric.”

If you want a good D&D movie (though, as you say, without the brand) I recommend checking out the Mythica series. It’s cheesy and cliche in all the right ways. I feel it perfectly captures the spirit of the game.

And after seeing Mythica, check out Critical Role on Geek & Sundry, which is probably the hottest D&D project on the web, with the DM being Matthew Mercer (from the Mythica series). The players are all voice actors, including Ashley Johnson (also of Blindspot)

Well, I’m not sure it exactly counts as a movie or D&D, seeing as they’re technically an Anime series based on a Japanese pen and paper game based roughly on D&D, but Record of Lodoss War and Slayers are both pretty good. Well, Slayers is a silly take on it, being a comedy, but Lodoss feels very D&D at least.

Yeah but Slayers did get turned into a Pen and Paper RPG which was pretty fun, if over the top and latter on to a d20 though, like most d20 adaptations.

Aaaand I just went down the rabbit hole and surfaced at SAO the movie premiere and it is going live on the 9th ….. sold out completely except for Sunday evening …. dang.

My favorite kind of healthy exercise is bicycling. I don’t know how useful this advice will be to you, but bicycling is a great exercise for heart and lungs that IMHO is way more fun and less brutal than jogging. I used to jog, and I had to stop because my knees couldn’t take it. But I can do long bike rides.

If you have to deal with hills, I’m not gonna lie, you won’t like it. Bikes do have gears, which do help; but hills can be hard for anyone, and if you are starting out from being overweight they are worse. But there’s nothing wrong with getting off the bike and just walking up a hill that’s too much for you.

I know that you have trouble with heat. If you are enough of a night owl, you could always get lights and reflectors and ride in the cool of the night. I know someone who prefers to ride between the hours of 3 to 5 A.M.

Bicycling has been a very positive thing for me, the exercise I actually like to do. I now have a couple decades of experience and if you ever want to tap me for advice, I’ll give you as much as you want, and I promise I won’t just tell you to spend a whole bunch of money you don’t have on the project.

Jackie, I’ve recently lost 60 lbs myself. If losing weight is the most important thing, I’ll offer you this advice: Cut out carbs and sugar.

Some carbs are okay, but you should be getting them from fiber whenever possible. Limit your sugar intake severely. Like, 1-2 cans of soda a month at max, use honey for coffee/tea/whatever. No white sugar if you can help it. No sweets or doughy snacks. Keep peanut butter to a minimum, too. If you feel a sugar craving, eat something fatty instead. (Bacon helps)

Also, eat more fiber. If I’m 25 and can commit to eating Fiber one for my health, I’m sure you can put some effort in there, too. I didn’t even commit to any exercise changes and I dropped from 245 to 180 over the course of ten months, with most of the change coming in the last six.

With that said, if you do need to exercise I recommend swimming, if you can tolerate chlorine. The cold water should help offset the temperature issues you have. Hope this helps.

I stopped eating and drinking sugary stuff, I think that worked well. No more sweets or sugary snacks and drink sparkling water instead of soda. After a couple of weeks, the sugary stuff tasted kind of gross and very “overdone”.

As to carbs, it’s been up and down. I tend to just avoid bread and rice without being a fanatic about it. Eating meat and protein tends to leave you feeling full anyway.

Another dietary thing that seems to keep things under control, at least, is to take 12 hours with no eating every night. So if you eat your last thing at 8PM, you can’t start eating again until 8AM. I found it fairly easy to do this, just be a bit OCD about it. I’ve been trying 14 hours instead, start at 10AM, which was pretty good. I was feeling a bit spontaneously hungry even. Next, I’ll see if I can stabilize at 16 hours: stop eating at 6PM, then start again at 10AM. That’s probably the practical limit.

About cooking and all: I have a very vague idea about how you live. You’re in a household with others in your family right? If so, maybe you can infiltrate and control the cooking process, including shopping. Resist the lure of the golden arches. Oh yeah, actually it’s probably good for you NOT to eat too tasty food. Because that makes you want more. Again, I found that drinking water when I’m feeling hungry works as a substitute.

Finally, it’s good to exercise in some way. I used to jog, now I try to take a nice walk every day, an hour or so. OK, so it’s minimalistic, what about it? Another thing that, somewhat sadly, was good exercise for me was cleaning the house: swabbing, sweeping, dusting, moving furniture, etc.

I remember there was some stupid made-for-television movie back in the late ’70’s or early ’80s trying to convince parents that AD&D was the root of all evil. I don’t remember the name but the guy apparently couldn’t distinguish between the game and reality and wandered around the city like a moron with his gamer friends trying to save him. It got presented as some kind of cinematic cautionary tale, but when I watched it with the group I gamed with at a friend’s house we couldn’t believe what absolute horseshit it was.

That’s “Mazes and Monsters” with Tom Hanks.

The book by Rona Jaffee (which I have) isn’t quite so preachy about the D&D aspects.. it’s clearly about the boy having mental issues and his breakdown, and his friends trying to help him than it is about D&D/Satanic Panic.

I own that book, and remember the movie. Both were very much about the D&D panic, but the book was much better, IMO. It focused more on the character’s breakdown. The end scene with the character having a “magic silver piece” (a quarter, IIRC, that he used to pay for his room, but kept returning under his pillow in the morning) was heart-breaking, at least to me. More than anything, that symbolized how lost he really was.

For easy healthy cheap meat dishes, a crockpot is your friend. The less expensive cuts need long slow wet cooking because they’re heavily worked muscles, so if you plop a chunk of chuck, say, into the crockpot with some liquid and hit the button, wait 8-12 hours, and eat for several days. All the recipes that say “brown the beef and put in pot” can be altered to “put in pot”. Throw in some potatoes and carrots, whatever’s on sale. Seriously, “Throw in pot, ignore 8 hours” is as easy as cooking gets, and it gives you a lot of choices. If you don’t have one, try the thrift store. I got mine for $5.

The Hobbit is pretty much the best D&D movie there is. I don’t remember the exact moment, but there was lots of time where I thought “Yeah that’s what I’d have done too if I was playing a burglar.” or “That’s great campaign material!” even though I read the book before becoming a player!

Every time it gets more outlandish, it gots closer to D&D. What about when Legolas makes his Reflex save VS. falling when the tower collapses? Or when Gandalf cast Dispel Magic on the illusions in the ruins, and then uses Magic Circle Against Evil when facing Sauron’s powers?

I agree it misses its marks sometimes as a Tolkien adaptation, but every times it verges away from the pure J.R.R.T. stuff, it is in a way that makes the movie closer to D&D material.

I agree there is yet to be a good ‘D&D’ movie, in no small part because Hollywood has yet to put in a real effort. But are lots of good movies that have D&D elements in them. Many have been mentioned above, but may I suggest ‘Knights of Badassdom’?
Group of Live Action RolePlayers who might be a little too far into their characters head out to the woods for a weekend convention with a hundred other geeks. Striving to add some realism to his wizard character, the one guy gets hold of an authentic ancient book of spells, and accidentally summons a real demon. Chaos ensues. Great role by Peter Dinklage, before he became famous.

Your clutch problems may be due to air in the hydraulic clutch release mechanism. I’ve had huge problems with this on my 1/2 ton Ford. Rangers are similar, but the reservoir is a separate piece, which makes the bleeding process easier. First off, have you checked the fluid in the clutch master cylinder reservoir? If you can get someone to help you, you may be able to add fluid, and pump the clutch pedal for a while, then have someone open and close the bleeder at the transmission. Might save you a few dollars. If not, here’s a link to a guy on youtube dealing with one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_qmeIlmbOY

What Jo’s talking about, of trying/learning social stuff in the safe environs of a game, I did exactly that for years. In LARP I would purposely build characters that were good at things that I was bad at, or who did a lot of something I was nervous doing. In that way I learned to be much less shy, and reasonably confident in social settings, and brave in business settings. Because I could try out different ways of behaving, with no worse consequence than maybe that character gets gakked (turned out none of the characters got gakked from me being trying this stuff, they got gakked because they poked demons with sticks or stymied a heretical faction). Years later when I admitted to my shrink that I’d done this, he nearly jumped to his feet in excitement. So I guess it’s professionally-approved as well as personally-tested.

I did the exact same thing. I was never good at social interaction as a child (found out recently that I’m somewhat autistic), but I got into role-playing and learned the ‘rules’ of social interaction through the game and was able to apply them to real life.

Or people love things and whether they are good or bad is entirely subjective. I loved the D&D movie with Justin Whalen. I think it’s a good movie. I don’t think it’s an objectively bad movie or badly acted or badly done. I think it’s genuinely really good.

I have seen “really good” stuff that if I were to pretend my subjective opinion was complete and utterly superior to everyone else’s I would say are crap. For example I think Brazil is a bad movie. I think it’s not well done and that it just generally sucks. I don’t then insist that the movie must then be objectively bad and that everyone should agree that they love a shitty broken movie.

Nina’s reasons are the same as what I decided when I started forum roleplaying, and doubly so when I started playing Second Life.

The real problem with the Dungeons and Dragons movies is the makers tried to do a story as though they were doing a classic fantasy narrative, but forgot that D&D is at its core a game played by several players, thus making it more of a meta story.

The Gamers, its sequels and other movies like it do a much better job of portraying D&D.

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