Thursday, January 19, 2012

Is Pop Culture in Paralysis?

Is Pop Culture in Paralysis?

something to think about....

Polone: Why There Are No Sure-Thing Movie Stars Anymore, But Hollywood Pretends There Are

Explains a lot about cinematic crap....
Polone: Why There Are No Sure-Thing Movie Stars Anymore, But Hollywood Pretends There Are

The God of Cursed Poets

Interesting article on the website for FIRST THINGS magazine about the tormented inner lives of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the three paragons of the Decadents. Just goes to show that beauty and misery are often two sides of the same coin...

The term poète maudit, or “cursed poet,” was coined by Paul Verlaine. His little book Les poètes maudits (1884) interleaved his own honorific prose with poems by some of the poets he most esteemed but whose very greatness assured that they were known only to the cognoscenti. It was their obscurity—society was indifferent to them because they were hard to understand—that prompted Verlaine to speak of them as cursed. This cultivated sense of neglect, even oppression, at the hands of the bourgeois philistines became the classic pose of the avant-garde.


Read the rest here.



Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Dungeons and Dundacity

...there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.
 Here's a thought...go back to 3.5 edition, in my opinion the most perfect form of the game yet produced...OGL, how you are missed!


Read the article from the NY Times here.