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Amazon Prime pilot season is upon us once more. I haven't had a chance to watch most of them, but I watched and quite enjoyed the pilot of Transparent, and wanted to recommend it.

It stars Jeffrey Tambor (who is consistently amazing in two of my favorite sitcoms, The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development) as the patriarch of a highly dysfunctional California Jewish family. Since I watched it in the afterglow of making my "Tradition" fanvid, which positions the Bluths as a highly dysfunctional California Jewish family with Jeffrey Tambor as the patriarch, I couldn't help but read the show as a sort of remake or reinterpretation of Arrested Development. Tonally, the show is very different, but the family structure has some similarities.

But I really enjoyed the family interplay, the outbursts of broken Yiddish, and most of all, the promise that this is a loving show about failure. I expect that in subsequent episodes these characters will fail again and again to connect as a family, fail professionally, fail personally, fail romantically, and the show will treat their failure sympathetically and laugh with them, not at them. I really hope this pilot gets picked up because I am looking forward to rooting hopelessly for them to make it all work.

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Roleplaying update.

I'm presently in 3 on-going games.

Most frequent is an in-person biweekly Alternity game in the Dark Matter setting, which is an X-Files knockoff that we're setting in 1992 with an extremely geeky attention to detail about when particular technological or cultural things were available. I'm playing Morton Johnson, a former AT&T telephone technician who got sucked into the culture of weird things when he discovered a mysterious code sequence bouncing from mainframe to mainframe, a ghost in the machine. He's dedicated to tracking it down and making sense of it, and has allied himself with the rest of the team and with the mysterious Hoffman Institute in order to get access to more information and greater resources to hunt the ghost. He serves as the team's hacker, cracker, mechanic, fix-it man, and far too often, bait. He's been attacked by a spectral panther, a possessed ten-year old, and a crooked Chicago cop, so far, and has come out the worse for the wear each time.


Somewhat less frequent is my friend Alai's ostensibly bi-weekly 1E/Labyrinth Lord/FLAILSNAILS Legacy of the Bieth game, taking place on Google+ Hangouts. Legacy of the Bieth is Alai's North African/Spaghetti Western low fantasy setting, which is really inventive and full of new and interesting wonders trying to kill us. I'm playing Netin al-Rila, an itinerant calligrapher and magic user who's always got a scam or two in motion. I rolled a CON score of 5 and emerged from character creation with 2 hit points, but through luck, some skill, and a lot more luck, I've somehow managed to coax him through a variety of adventures to Level 2. He now has 3 hit points! And 2 spells a day! It's my first 'old school D&D' game and I've been enjoying the lethality of the system, the sense of fragility that spurs creative solutions along with caution. The amount of cockamamie in our plans has been truly astonishing.


And third I'm in an in person D&D 3.5 dungeon crawl that's more or less monthly. I'm playing Temnar Pla, a half-elf mercenary fighter with only one arm and even less brains. His missing arm has a socket that he has used for a swiss-army knife worth of attachments- ax, sword, light crossbow, grappling hook launcher, etc... He acquired a masterwork chef's knife from an orc we killed and since then I've been progressing him toward the Field Chef prestige class, a joke class whose apex is the ability to create meals from monsters that give the eater some of the abilities of the monster. The other fun thing has been a running kill total competition between my fighter and the party's other front line fighter, which has given us plenty of amusement.

The other front line fighter's boyfriend pulled me over after our latest session and told me that she's looking to do more 'roleplaying' and that he pointed her to me as the person most likely to play along. Which is probably true. The rest of the group tends to be more gamist in their approach to rpgs, while my preference is a blend of narrativist and gamist. I've been happily bashing the dungeon crawl with the rest of the party, but I'm excited to see what kind of storytelling we can add with a little more conscious effort.


In addition, I've been poking with metamorphage at my own storygame, which I'm tentatively titling The Weapon. It's a game that sets out to hoist the players on their own petard, and I'm pretty excited to try it out. I'm planning to invite a few friends to a first playtest in the next few weeks.