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Every so often I’ll need to make a post that’s not about a movie, but to impart some general information about Against the ’70s. These posts shall be henceforth known as Let’s All Go to the Lobby!1
It looks like a bill has embedded itself into Peter Boyle’s skull.
I’ve turned on paid subscriptions. You can now give me money! Isn’t that great for you? A few grumbles and caveats, though. On my About page, I initially said that paid subscriptions would be $2 per month. Guess what? Substack requires a minimum of $5/month2. I’m not happy about this — it’s not what I want to charge, and it changes my plans for how I was going to develop this newsletter. I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t think a post a week — $1.25 a post — is quite worth five buckaroos a month. After giving it some consideration, I’ve decided to keep it, but work towards really earning that price3. I’m going to lay the groundwork for two posts a week (although that second post may or may not be a film post), and any Cypher System products I make — not the ones I append to the end of my film posts, but ones featuring my own IP and have an actual, designed layout — will be behind the paywall. This means adventures, new Foci, new creatures, stuff like that. A lot of this stuff isn’t going to happen for awhile, so — and I shouldn’t say this either — I’d say hold off, unless you just want to support me in general (or you want to support my Best Album of 19xx account on Twitter in a roundabout way)4.
Suspiria is Italian, so I won’t be getting to it for awhile. But wait, it’s in English, or at least dubbed in English. So maybe I will? I’m so confused. What do you say, Jessica Harper?
English-language films only, for the time being. This is something I’ve should’ve said earlier. My focus for Against the ’70s is looking at America through an uncanny lens, so most (but not all) of the films I’m examining will be American. (Some UK and Canadian films will slip through. We’ll treat them with kindness, I promise.) But yes, ultimately, I will (have to) broaden that lens. One of my criticisms of Damnation Decade is that while it focuses on America, it does give a quick tour of the entire world — but Italy, home of the giallo and the poliziotteschi, gets short shrift. I don’t want to be a hypocrite, do I? I do not want to be a hypocrite. Expect non-English language films in the future5.
Detail from the cover of the Cortex Prime Game Handbook by Cam Banks.
Cortex Prime! There’s a new role-playing game on the block! Actually, it’s not that new, don’t know why I said that. But there is a game that is now offering commercial licenses to sell your own material, and that game is Cortex Prime. Cortex Prime is an extremely interesting and extremely different kind of system compared to both Cypher System and Dungeons & Dragons. To be extremely reductive, in Cortex, all your stats are different kinds of dice. You roll all these stat dice together (usually 3 or more) and then select two to add together to make a score that is used to beat a target number. Then, you pick another one of your dice to represent how well you did, and it’s the kind of die (d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12) that determines that, not the result on it. Pretty neat! Anyway, I never meant to hook my metaphorical wagon to Cypher System only, so I’ll be looking into this opportunity in the future. I should note that the response from the fans and creators to the initial legal document has been, uh, less than good. However, I fully expect the kinks to be worked out by the time I get around to it6.
And that’s the news on my end! Come back tomorrow for Logan’s Run!
Originally published 12/2/21 on Substack.
I only did two more of these, although I did do quite a few more non-film posts. Now that this is a blog and not a newsletter, and I don’t feel like each newsletter email needs to be an “event,” I hope I can do more quickie bloggie items.↩︎
You may have been wondering why I haven’t been using Patreon this entire time, especially now, since you can (to my knowledge) set your rates to whatever you want over there. Only one reason, really: from an aesthetic and UI perspective, Patreon sucks to high heaven. It’s ugly and navigating it, for me at least, is an exercise in masochism. Will I keep my options open anyway? Buddy, I always keep my options open. [ETA 1/5/23: I eventually did create a Patreon, it got 3 subscribers, all people I greatly admire, and will be shutting it down in a few months. There was a decent chance that I never would have made this blot.im blog and stuck with Patreon, but what I said before still holds: aesthetically, and from a UI perspective, Patreon still sucks shit. I hate it as a creator and I barely tolerate it as a reader.]↩︎
To be blunt, I never really earned it. I was able to keep up a post a week for a bit, but exhaustion soon set in.↩︎
Not to get into it, but the Twitter Best Album of 19xx tournament account is now split between a brand-new newsletter called The Best Album Brackets and a Bluesky account.↩︎
As of this writing (1/5/23), I did posts on Master of the Flying Guillotine (Chinese) and Deep Red (Italian).↩︎
I never did anything with Cortex. Part of the issue was the rule book: it was organized in such a way as to make it extremely hard for me to read and understand. Each chapter detailed a rule, like how to hit, how damage works, etc. That was fine, but then the rule would be followed by eight kajillion variants. Which variant was the best for me? Impossible to say without playing them all. That said, I still do like the system, so maybe I’ll try again at some point.↩︎
