Author: Frylock

Robert E. Bodine, Esq. is an attorney in Virginia focusing his practice on real estate and intellectual property law. He is one of the founding members of the Gamers’ Syndicate, a Washington, DC-based gaming club. He was the author of the Loremaster.org article series, Protection from Chaos, dealing with intellectual property law matters as they relate to the gaming industry, and has represented several game designers on intellectual property matters. You can follow him on Twitter @RobertEBodine for politics, @PropertyAtty for legal matters, @GSLLC for gaming matters, and if you’re a sports fan, @MMADork.

Good Watch: White Lines @laurajhaddock @martamilans @TomRhysHarries @DanielMays9 @netflix #GoodWatch #QuarantineLife

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White Lines is the story of a search for answers. As the characters find their answers, it opens old wounds and creates new ones.

Twenty years prior, the older brother of Zoe Collins (Laura J. Haddock) was murdered and dumped in deserted land, and now she’s ensnared in a web of drugs, assaults, and other assorted crimes. The first episode was uneven, but once you’ve got the basic premise explained, it picks up. At times, I was squirming in my seat. Episode 8 is a killer in that regard.

White Lines also stars Marta Milans of whom I’ve become a fan of late, Nuno Lopes, a perfectly-cast Daniel Mays (Tivik!), and Tom Rhys Harries as the long-deceased Axel Collins. The only thing I don’t like about the show is that characters often speak in Spanish (it takes place in Spain), so I can’t take my eyes off the screen for a second (at those times). However, I blame myself for having never learned Spanish. I’d say I deserve that pain in the ass.

Season 1 is on Netflix. As always, YMMV.

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D&D with Celebrities @ChrisPerkinsDnD @DavidKHarbour @BrandonJRouth @karengillan @PomKlementieff @ #DnD #RPG #DnDLive2020

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Sundays are now lazy days for me. Going forward, I’m just going to re-post other people’s work. Today, its a video from last weekend of several actors playing D&D with Chris Perkins behind the screen.

I still haven’t watched the whole video, but I can tell you that, while all four of them got the hang of building character concepts and role-playing (duh; they’re actors), David Harbour clearly understood how to play these kinds of games. At one point, he spontaneously helped along a confused Pom Klementieff as if he were an experienced DM.

There were some funny moments throughout. Here’s one.

I’m not a fan of watching other people play, but if you are, there were several other celebrity games that weekend, all of which are on the D&D YouTube channel.

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Favorite Watch: Aqua Teen Hunger Force @DanaSnyder @DaveWillis2 @hbomax #ATHF #GoodWatch #QuarantineLife

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With HBO Max going live, you must have known it was only a matter of time before I started re-watching this series. My license plate tag is Frylock. After a 24-year absence from Dungeons and Dragons, the first character I created was Frylock, the half-elf warmage/rogue. I’ve recreated Frylock in 4th and 5th Edition. My blog is … well, you knew that. Too bad Carey Means isn’t on Twitter.

And as much as I like series with 30-minute episodes, one with 12- to 13-minute episodes is even easier to watch. I can watch one or two before I leave for work in the morning.

As always, YMMV, but if you don’t like this show, you’re objectively wrong. You might as well say you hate Star Trek, you dipshit.

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How I Watch Movies @KesselJunkie #movie

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Yesterday my cousin, kesseljunkie, was mulling over second chances. Specifically, he was theorizing as to why we give things, especially movies, a second chance. He gave two reasons (you’re going to have to click through to read them); I responded in the comments with a third (edited for spelling).

Here’s a third option that may very well be unique to me (or extremely rare; I dunno). By way of example, leading up to the Dark Knight Rises, I heard lots of rumors that Marion Cotillard was playing Talia al Ghul. I read up on who that character was. Nevertheless, SPOILER ALERT the moment she stabbed Batman, I was shocked for an instant. That’s because my brain purposefully blanks out everything I’ve heard so that I can watch a movie as it unfolds with no preconceptions, spoilers, etc. As a puzzle nerd, it also allows me to solve the mystery if there is one.

This comes from my copyright background, or perhaps my attraction to copyright is based on this personality quirk (i.e., chicken and egg). When analyzing for infringement, you do both an intrinsic (how does it feel?) and extrinsic (let’s break down the science) analysis of a song to determine whether it’s infringement. My first run at a movie is intrinsic — I either like it or I don’t — and each subsequent viewing is extrinsic. I try to figure out *what* made me like it (or hate it in the rare occasion I watch a hated movie again). I also try to discover things I missed, and perhaps experience the two things you mention. They probably apply to me as well.

But that’s just me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. YMMV.

This may explain why my rating of movies is so eccentric.

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Good Watch: #Hush @netflix #GoodWatch #QuarantineLife

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The premise: A deaf and mute writer (played by Kate Siegel) lives in a home in the woods. She enjoys the isolation over her former life in the city. A man in a mask arrives threatening to kill her. Hush is less than 90 minutes long, so it’s no surprise that on 25 minutes in, you see the killer’s face. There’s no time to spare. 93/73

Her disability didn’t seem to play an important role in the movie other than to add a bit of color to the story. This had me thinking: What it would be like if the movie had absolutely no audio? The protagonist is deaf, and we’re supposed to step inside her shoes and feel her fear. What better way to relate to her than to experience the events from her true perspective?

Overall, the cast is good, but the writing fell flat, and I felt like they ran out of things to say, which would explain its 82-minute runtime (includes credits). We’re never given the killer’s motivation, but he’s so incompetent it appears he doesn’t want to win. Fortunately for him, everyone was incompetent, making all the wrong moves at almost every step. Perhaps that was necessary, as the slightest bit of competence would have cut the movie length to 15 minutes. The killer is played by John Gallagher, Jr., who I’ve always liked, but he’s never played an intimidating character as far as I know. There’s good reason for that. I wasn’t at all intimidated despite the neck tattoo, which was obviously a cheap attempt to buff him. At least the character he played was self-aware in this regard.

I don’t understand why it received such good scores on Rotten Tomatoes (93 from the critics and 73 from the audience), but I seem to be alone on this one. What do I know?

It wasn’t clever, original, or scary, which is all it tried to be, but in the time it took you to read this post, you could have watched the movie. As always, YMMV, and cats don’t give a shit.

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Good Watch: #Fractured @netflix #GoodWatch #QuarantineLife

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Sam Worthington has done a few movies for Netflix. I haven’t enjoyed any of them until now. This one I did. Worthington plays a man on a Thanksgiving road trip with his wife and daughter. There’s an incident, and he has to rush his daughter to the hospital. He’s told only one of them may go back with the daughter during treatment, and he defers to his wife. After a brief nap, he wakes up and asks for a status report. The doctors and staff say that his wife and daughter were never there. Then the real story begins.

This didn’t end the way I was expecting, and while a bit of a strain on logic, it was a refreshing change of pace. As always, YMMV.

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Eye of the Beholder @GOGcom #videogame #QuarantineLife

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I recently rediscover the classic (1990) video game, Eye of the Beholder (“EotB”). For a limited time, the trilogy were offered free from GoG.com, which allows you to play them on your modern PC. You can still get them, but I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for them.

I used to be a video game junkie back in the days of arcades, but by the time they reached people’s homes, I was either too busy or too poor to play. Eventually, I lost interest. EotB came out during that overlap between those two periods. Considering what most video games looked like at that point in time (as far as I knew), the graphics and game play for EotB was phenomenal. It was as good as some arcade games. Moreover, I was particularly attracted to this game because in 1981, I was forbidden from playing role-playing games due to several unsubstantiated anecdotes of how damaging they could be (e.g., Satanism, failing out of school).

If you don’t have a nostalgic connection to the game, you may not like playing it, but this is exactly the kind of thing that can make quarantine life bearable. 🙂

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Good Watch: Circle @netflix #GoodWatch #QuarantineLife

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It’s hard to discuss this movie without engaging in spoilers. It’s a cast of mostly unknown actors (I vaguely recognized a couple of them) who are standing in a room. They realize that every minute or so, they must vote on which one of them is to be killed. There’s no way of knowing how many will have to die for the sick game to end, nor is there anything more than conjecture as to how they got there and who put them there.

I shouldn’t have liked this movie because it requires far too great a leap in logic. But I did. I certainly didn’t like the ending. It was trite and answered no question. Everything is left to interpretation.

But for some reason, I liked it. As always, YMMV.

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A Summary of the #MCU Leading up to #Endgame @MarvelStudios

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Sundays are now lazy days for me. Going forward, I’m just going to re-post other people’s work. Today, it’s one hour and 14 minutes of some of the most important moments in the MCU leading up to Avengers: Endgame.

Maybe watch it at double speed.

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Great Watch: The I.T. Crowd @BigBoyler @RichardAyoade @porksmith @ITCrowdSupport @netflix #GoodWatch #QuarantineLife

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The I.T. Crowd is four-series, British sitcom that aired from 2009-2010, and then concluded with a single episode in 2013. After the first couple of episodes, my first thought was that it was a perfect blend of humor that did and didn’t translate well to American audiences. By the first episode of series 2, I was laughing out loud nearly constantly. Seriously; it’s that funny. It’s one of those shows that spends the first series/season getting to know the characters, and then once they’re established, lets them go nuts.

It’s also an easy watch. Each episode is less than 25-minutes long, and each series is only 6 episodes, so the entire show is less than 13 hours long (the finale is 48 minutes). You could hammer out the entire show in a weekend if you’re so inclined.

As an attorney, I find it funny that, despite America’s deep history of free speech, we can’t say, “fuck,” on TV. England is hardly totalitarian, but their laws tend to be less tolerant of speech in general. However, when it comes to silly things, England just doesn’t care, so it seems they have less a need for protections like ours. I’m not sure if my observation is on target, but that’s how it seems to me.

As always, YMMV.

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