Ben Rowe
@cineastbenrowe
Calgary Cinematheque Programming Co-ordinator, Scream Scene Podcast co-host, Dungeon Master, he/him.
I often think about this passage from the 3.5 era "Dark Sun DM's Guide" by David Noonan, which sums up the major themes of adventure in the setting -- one throughline of all of them is the idea of nurturing the flicker of hope.
The new Ghost in the Shell continues to be excellent and maybe the best new anime of the year. Anyone missing the darker tone of past installments will find episode 4 "Robot Rondo" to their liking.
A great example of something on the immersion/translation scale that almost always gets put on the translation side is beauty standards. We need to understand Helen is incredibly beautiful so an actress matching contemporary beauty standards is cast rather than try to match historical ones.
I just always think about how no one knew what the boar's tusk helmet description was supposed to be about until we started finding them in real life and started realizing that somehow a lot of Homer's descriptions were actually accurate to the period in ways no one expected.
Top Gun is a movie that got a totally mid critical reception but from the perspective of 2026 looks like a masterpiece because in 1986 even popcorn movies had incredible cinematography.
Sorry Women's World, but given that Harlan Ellison has been bitching about this to anyone who would listen for 60 years, I'd hardly call it an exclusive.
This art for the upcoming new Ravenloft book is cool. Makes me think of... Andrew MacLean? Maybe? Anyone know who the artist is?
Just saw someone use "s//ggsual" in a post, so they censored the censored version of the word. I think we all need to stop being cowards.
Well folks, the long years of "2024 Player's Handbook" are over -- WotC's officially calling it 5.5 on the website now:
So I guess no one was gonna tell me she was an absolute smoke show in the 50s and 60s??
So listen, I don't mean to be rude. But. When I was a young child, I would watch Lamb Chop's Play-a-Long, and Shari Lewis was like, your kooky older aunt.
YouTube keeps giving me clips from the animated Gotham by Gaslight, and I find it weird that the characters don't look like Mike Mignola art, and even WEIRDER that they look exactly like Sean Galloway character designs when he apparently didn't work on it at all?
One of the most fascinating artistic evolutions in comics is looking at Sal Buscema's incredibly long run on Spectacular Spider-Man. Here's a page from his first issue on the book, in 1976, and his last issue, in 1995.
The details being that Canada refuses to pay $1 billion to join and also would require assurances that the mission of the organization would be restoring humanitarian aid to Gaza, which has been cut off for so long.
What made this dumb stooge think NOW was the time that being ex-ICE would make for a good Congressional run?
Ohmygod. It just hit me. Trump and his cronies probably think Greenland is huge because the US still uses Mercator projection as the standard.
I'm sure someone on the Discord beat me to it but I am pretty sure you guys are thinking of the title card from "Harley and Ivy", an earlier episode that is not Christmas related and is simply the first time the two teamed up.
It is really starting to disgust me how often I am seeing major online outlets using terrible AI "upscales" of animated images. It's always really easy to spot and it's totally unnecessary in a case like this - Beauty and the Beast was painted on cels for film! Grab a blu-ray screenshot! Compare: