TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE February/28 - To the lighthouse!
Writing rpgs, thinking about movies, feeling content. All good states of being.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2022 -- bounce.
The Lighthouse at Kindred Rocks - my latest writing rpg.
I’m launching my latest writing rpg on itch.io right now - I told you I was enjoying writing these things!
Go scope out The Lighthouse at Kindred Rocks now - download it for free!
This one’s a small coastal town, with a lighthouse [natch], and you’ve returned to bury your father. You stick around to take up his old job as the lighthouse keeper because not much other success has come your way in life. But you suddenly find yourself discovering that your father’s death isn’t really a clear case of events, and certain memories of your home town remind you that things are weird, and they’re only getting weirder.
Take a trip to Kindred Rocks to discover what arcane eldritch horrors are buried in the town’s hearts and past, and see if maybe you can make the place a little better, or maybe just live long enough to survive the madness.
This one was a fun one to write, I love a lighthouse as a setting, and the chance to play with a seaside town that’s hiding something dark beneath the surface is always fun.
As always, this one’s up for free, so just download the one page pdf and see if you want to get creative. I’d appreciate anyone sharing the link.
You can also scope out my other single page solo journaling rpgs:
Welcome To Faraday - a suburban horror story
The Seven Islands of Qoy - a mystical kung fu tournament story
I can also happily tease that I’m polishing off another one - ‘The Heist on Foley Lane’ is the Elmore Leonard-inspired writing rpg you’ve always needed in your life, coming soon.
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Chipping away at things.
This past week saw me making slow, but steady, progress on the new comic. The 24 page plan now reflects 24 pages instead of 30 [idiot]. I’ve scripted the opening 3 page sequence and I really dig it [correct at time of newsletter publication]. I’ve added a few extra pages, but am realising that a story so deeply rooted in actual Australia, and actual locations, needs actual reference, and instead of clogging up my script with images, I might need a visual bible for the kinds of places that have multiple and specific things - like local pubs in the outback in the 60s, and the views of the Gulf of Carpentaria, etc.
I also got a chance to look over all of Louie Joyce’s art for our graphic novella, and then look over the script [again] and align them even tighter. We’ve got a preview coming in the back of another awesome comic soon, and hopefully we’ll move towards knowing specific launch dates in the coming months.
I am so incredibly excited for this one to be out in the wild because it’s such a beautiful and unique work of art from Louie. He’s gone into full level up mode in the making of this one.
Then there’s SPEED REPUBLIC #2 coming out in about a month, right at the end of March, and having just proofed a pdf of this issue I can confirm it’s A-Mazing. I just read #2 and #3 back to back over the weekend and they are both different, almost self-contained, and bloody awesome. I really like the flashback thread through #2, so I’m dying for this comic to come out now.
As for the EVERFROST tpb - at this stage the date is holding to the end of April, but with boats and paper and world wars and life in this decade, who the hell knows? But fret not, I can confirm it is still coming and one day we’ll all rejoice with it in our hands. Always keen to shepherd more Sami Kivela art into the world.
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ASD&D.
Continued to DM my mates through an adventure. Being Level 15, they’re all prone to leaning into strengths and as such rolling things above a 20, so success is good and strong and prolific, which meant when anyone would roll a Natural 1 I’d be certain to make it just as much of a fail as I would a Natural 20 become a joyous success. It made for some interesting moments, and the players didn’t mind, so that made it a good session.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
I’ve somehow got no links from this week. An entire internet out there and I’m not reading much of it. Says a lot about where I’m putting my focus lately, I suppose. Or about what’s out there each week and whether it’s worth my time.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
OUT OF SIGHT - after reading the book by Elmore Leonard, I wanted to watch the film while it was still fresh. It’s been a while, but my firm memory is absolutely loving this film a lot back in the day, based on Scott Frank’s impeccable adaptation, Steven Soderbergh’s really slick directing, and the deep cast’s 100% on point choices of performance. My rewatch holds that it’s still great, but I can’t help but bring a new eye to it a few decades later.
The first part: viewing the flick with a feminist lens instantly makes you sqirm a fair amount. Clooney escapes from prison and, along with Ving Rhames, bamboozles Jennifer Lopez’s federal marshall and tosses her in the boot of her car, whereupon Clooney sidles in behind her. Reading this sequence in the book, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable with the way Clooney’s ageing bank robber, Jack Foley, talks to Lopez’s Karen Cisco. He’s just pushing the line at lascivious constantly in the book, though Frank smartly dials that back a bit in the script. But there is still the fact an escaped convict has tossed a woman in the boot and sidled in behind her to spoon her while the getaway driver takes them away. While in there, he’s tracking his torchlight up and down her body, and making small talk. It’s played as a tense yet sexy moment, and it works as such, but if you add in the inherent danger/fear that must take place then you can’t help but feel a little icky about it all. The scene works on the screen because of the easy chemistry between Lopez/Clooney, so we buy it, but it feels like the story basically tells us “Oh, she isn’t scared, she’s a federal marshall, so if she isn’t scared, we shouldn’t see this as icky” and there’s a problem in the construction of this purely on the basis of the way media can inform the world. Is there a risk other people start to see their aggressive advances as charming and loaded with chemistry? Possibly. But we can’t censor fiction based on how it might be perceived, right? Ehhhh, in this case, it’s touchy, and while you could argue that Lopez acted the scene so she obviously thinks it’s fine, but it’s also a scene written by Leonard, then Frank, directed by Soderbergh, and performed by Clooney, all whom are older white men, each with more power in Hollywood at that time than her. And all of this is not condemnation, or cancelling, but merely thinking out loud and in circles as a brain should do when considering fiction deeply.
There’s a moment in the trunk where Clooney has his hand on Lopez’s hip, and he’s snapping his fingers as he tries to find the word, and the implication is he isn’t holding her down, he isn’t groping her, he’s just in a tight space, and he’s doing his best to be casual, be conversation, so he’s the opposite of those negatively loaded traits we’d consider in an armed hostage situation. It’s a moment that’s specifically placed to make us mentally diffuse the icky factor of this scene, and it worked…but does that mean something like that can make it fine forever? I don’t know.
The central thesis of the film’s romantic plot is “What if we’d met under different circumstances?” Both characters start to wonder if their obvious chemistry would have led to a more agreeable outcome if it hadn’t been in the boot of a car. This concept works in the book, it works in the film, and it’s an interesting angle for Leonard to have taken in the first place as the book reads far more like a romance written by a guy who knows his way from crime plots, rather than just a romantic subplot added into a heist film. The hard work is done to seed the connection from inside the boot, as you see these two people find little strands of connection that intrigue them both, and the fact that Lopez is shown as enough of a bad ass to make us believe that she would be in control the whole time makes us not need to worry ourselves with any of the concern about the sexual relationship dynamics at play that might be toxic. Both characters chase the other just as hard after the initial meet-cute, so I guess it’s no harm, no foul - which is a dangerous phrase to use for a male-on-female crime, no matter the outcome.
It’s still a flick whose style I really admire, and the rewiring of the structure of the plot is so subtle in the adaptation - I swear 90% of everything just came straight from Leonard’s pages, but Frank does just enough to heighten the tension, the drama, the connections, and even the romantic tone of it all. I’d be interested to teach this in a crime fiction unit [hell, even a romance fiction unit] to showcase how audiences can be positioned to interpret characters on the screen. If you get Foley played by anyone with less charm or looks than Clooney then the sleaze factor would crush the premise and the film. If you get someone anywhere less confident than Lopez and you’d worry for half the film. You get to see charming gentlemen bank robbers, and you get to see crazy street killers [and the possible racist implications of these characters, though Ving Rhames taking Foley’s right-hand man’s role muddies the waters a little in ways that would be interesting to unpack]. Soderbergh knows his way around the camera so his use of angles, framing, and transitions all play into how the audience is supposed to feel. And from what I can see, you could use a feminist lens, a Marxist lens, and a critical race theory lens and they’d all yield something interesting to unpack.
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
Thinking a lot about contentment this week. Not hyperbolic glee, or the inky depths of despair, but just that feeling you get when everything feels pretty pretty pretty good.
Thinking about it and wondering how much of it comes not from actual happy feelings, but rather the absence of stress. I can admit I live a good life. I have a balance between: love, life, work, hobbies, family, friends, health, and finance. Those are the key things that spring to mind right now. None of them are so gangbusters I’d think Hollywood will write a movie about me, they’re just things sitting in a decent position.
But I also carry around stress in regards to…let’s say, 6 out of those 8 things. Also: no stress so major that someone should tell my story. But stress exists, my brain likes to assess it from every angle, laboriously, over time, so it all builds up. But realistically, none of those stresses is worth any major time or consternation, despite what my brain would have me believe.
There was a moment, though, on the weekend where I sat down with a coffee in hand, the warm morning sun behind me, and I realised that I held no current stress in any of those 8 areas. And in that moment I felt calm and content. Note: none of those 8 areas had suddenly been magically solved, or levelled up, but rather I wasn’t actively picking at the scab on any of them, as I’m prone to do.
It was a lovely feeling and I consciously drew it in and acknowledged it and labelled it and thought back to it multiple times.
It led into a later conversation; are bulls sad? Their lives look so boring and unhappy, so surely they are. But I get the feeling that bulls aren’t sad, they have very little stress, and they are just chill. It’s a silly thought, and conversation, but I then linked it to people in other walks of life where they aren’t considering the million things of our modern lives, and they live simply and yet find great contentment. Because it might not be about finding the greatest joys to imbibe, but rather just eliminating some of the stresses that hound us. I don’t need to take a promotion and double my workload just to get a little more scratch in my pocket, which I’ll then dump into buying more things to fill the void that’s growing because I’m missing out on moments of relaxation or connection due to work/life stress. I don’t need fancier clothes, or an office chair with an ass-warming pad, or superfly hypertech sneakers when all I’m doing is 30 minutes of walking a day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always need more books. My kids have finally clocked to the fact that I buy them in greater volume than I ever read them, and my response was basically: Whatever, shuttup!
But I swear to god some of the best moments of the past week were: fixing my worm tea production bin, sitting in some camp chairs and talking shit with a mate for a minute, reading my book and annotating some thoughts into it, getting Wordle in 2 goes, and copping a quick nap during a movie with the kids.
I get more endorphins from a really good laugh than I do most other things.
So I’m just considering my own expectations with things, and giving focus to what makes me happy, and recognising when things are good. It helps my brain a lot, and it can use all the help it can get.
The last section made me very happy. Happy for you but also just happy to be sharing those reflections with you. Thanks.