Not sure if this is a case of Stockholm syndrome, but two hip hop albums in two days, and I’m finding them … OK? I know that I’m probably only catching a fraction of the clever rhymes and wordplay here, but the music is satisfyingly funky and I can let it wash over me. Probably not one I’d go back to and listen again, but I didn’t actively hate it which is probably progress of a sort.
https://album.link/gb/i/723665537
I was slightly wary of this one, noticing that every track was marked with the E for Explicit warning, but ended up being pleasantly surprised. OK, so I’m still not 100% on board with the lyrical content or the relentless nature of the vocal delivery, but the music behind it was varied and interesting with some cheeky and well chosen samples, even including Swing Out Sister.
A cautious 3 stars from me.
https://album.link/gb/i/1540123415
In this film, Mark Rylance plays an English cutter running a high class tailor shop in Chicago of the 1950s. He treats all of his gentlemen customers with respect and discretion, especially the sharp suited mobsters who use the back of his shop as a drop box for messages. He takes a fatherly concern when his young receptionist Mable appears to be showing an interest in Richie, the son of the local Irish mob boss Roy Boyle. Mable denies that there is anything serious going on, sharing her dreams of travelling the world one day but having to be satisfied with her snow globes of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.
One fateful snowy night, Richie is dragged into the shop accompanied by the ambitious Boyle Capo Francis. The pair are on the run from the both the cops and the rival LaFontaine gang, and Richie has been badly shot and is in need of sewing up. Francis is also carrying a briefcase with a tape from a hidden FBI bug that he believes will prove the identity of a rat in the organisation.
From that point, the drama plays out with some satisfying twists with the tape as the maguffin. There are some tense (and sometimes bloody) scenes with Mark Rylance on top form as the voice of calm reason attempting to placate the hot headed men in power, echoing his best known role as Cromwell in Wolf Hall. The use of a single set and the claustrophobic air make this feel a little like a stage play, but that suits the nature of this story.
This exhaustive history of the RPG industry covers the fate of the companies that were founded in the 1990s as well as the trends and developments during that decade.
The most interesting thread covered one of the biggest players in White Wolf, publishers of Vampire : The Masquerade and related games. I had been aware of these games from someone I knew who took them very seriously indeed, but they clearly brought a lot of new people into the hobby and made good use of ideas like metaplots across different games and crossovers with fiction and LARPing.
The other major story was the financial implosion of D&D publishers TSR and their acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, who were in turn gobbled up by Hasbro. Their story is something of a roller coaster with the new third edition of D&D and the associated D20 licencing agreement leading to something of a bubble as many other smaller publishers rushed out a slew of D20 compatible games only to have the rug pulled out from under them as the terms of the licence were changed, followed by a 3.5 edition with significant differences.
Financial pressure from Hasbro led to a series of redundancies at WotC including venerable names and lead designers, just as they were working on the innovative but critically panned and short lived 4th edition which seemed designed to appeal to players of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft as well as tactical miniatures games. This in turn led to the rise of Paizo with their Pathfinder game which was effectively good old D&D to all intents and purposes, and which at one point looked like it might even eclipse the original game.
It was definitely a turbulent time, but it set the foundations for things to come later.
