#REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

This was one of the most purely fun movies I’ve seen in a while.

I had an epic Labor Day weekend, y’all. Got two projects done around the house that needed doing. Read two and a half entire books. Took naps. And, wonder of wonders, last night my wife and I watched a movie.

This movie has been out for a while, and I’m far from convinced that my opinion matters at this point, but I think if you’ve ever played D&D in your life you probably owe it to yourself to give this a watch. If you never played D&D or are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy genre in general, I’m not sure how well it will hit with you– the interesting thing to me is that the harder the movie leaned into the Forgotten Realms setting, the less I liked it. For some reason, references to Baldur’s Gate kept tossing me out of the movie, and Elminster himself makes an appearance that just felt weirdly inappropriate. It’s rare that I think something should have been more generic, but at least for me this movie could have been pulled out of the Realms and dropped into its own setting and I would have been fine with it.

That’s my only complaint, though. Everything else I have to say is positive. The cast is excellent across the board; I’ve never had any particular feelings about Chris Pine one way or another but he’s perfectly cast as a bard, and Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian character is a lot of fun as well. Everyone is really pretty and I feel like the director had a goal with the cast to push back a little bit on the idea that fantasy fiction has to be white– there are a ton of racially-ambiguous brown people in this movie, and Pine’s Ed is in an interracial marriage, and their daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, is freaking adorable. Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as a slimy con man, the villain is creepy as fuck, and in general the group dynamics make you feel like everyone had a lot of fun making this movie. The movie isn’t precisely a comedy but where it’s funny it’s funny, and the action sequences were genuinely awesome. There’s a bit at about the 1/3 mark where Rodriguez’ Holga character wins a fight with a paving stone she pries out of the road at her feet, and her fights are always full of improvised weaponry and creativity. They’re amazing, and there’s never any question about what’s going on. I wasn’t expecting action this well-shot from this movie, and it was great to see. Bigger action directors should learn from it, honestly.

Plus? Owlbears. Gelatinous Cubes. Freakin’ displacer beasts. A fat dragon. If they’d found a place to stuff a Hook Horror into the movie they’d have hit nearly all of my favorite D&D monsters. If you thought for even a minute that you might enjoy this, give it a watch while it’s on Netflix. Thumbs way up.

They’re not crooked, I swear

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, WorkLeave a comment

No better use of my Labor Day that I can think of than taking away work from a fine union electrician by installing new lights in the Shitty Bathroom (TM) by myself, and by “by myself” I mean “with the capable assistance of my wife everywhere my fat hands and massive body wouldn’t let me reach a screw.” I did do all the wiring, though, so y’all can use this as evidence when the house burns down. It’s okay, I’m union too.

Turns out the first time we did this job we didn’t use properly damp-resistant lighting, so they both needed replacement. This means that over the course of this weekend I fixed a recliner and wired two lights, so my masculine virility is off the chart right now.

More later, I have a nerd movie to review, and remember: people fought and died for the right to a five-day, forty-hour work week. Solidarity forever.

Not even gonna pretend

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Taking tonight off. Enjoy your Saturday.

EDIT: Ten minutes after posting this, I took out Yagyu Jubei. Who wants to touch me?

In which I forgot the rules

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

So I think I mentioned a bit ago that the first Nioh 3 DLC dropped?

I’ve been focusing on reading after work (and, well, lesson plans) and so I just really got a chance to dig into Hell Rising for the first time today. You can pretty much jump straight into the DLC content from wherever you want, so Idid that, and got through the first area without a whole lot of trouble, and most of that was related to not remembering details of the controls and some bad habits that Rise of the Ronin taught me. The controls are mostly the same between the two games, but there are some definite differences and Nioh is much harder and button-mashing will get your ass killed. Unfortunately my main weapon in the game is the talons, which are a super-fast weapon that, well, tends to be button-mashy.

Anyway, I died in a few places where I shouldn’t have, but no big deal. Got to the first boss. Held my own for maybe a minute. And then the fucker one-shotted me, and not with, like, a massive special attack that I didn’t see coming. No, I missed a dodge and he knocked me into next week with a regular sword strike.

I forgot that the DLCs in previous games may have said that they were accessible at a certain level, but what they really meant by that was be this level, but also have completely beaten every available difficulty level of the base game, and be really good at it, because it’s going to get even worse when DLC 2 drops.

I have not beaten every available difficulty of the base game. I platinumed the initial difficulty level, but New Game +? It is to laugh.

I, uh, have some work to do.

This is what I mean

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I gave my Math Lab class a paper with six equations on it today, and this one was easily the most difficult of the six. I told them that they did not need to do the equations in order and that I would be paying close attention as they worked, to their conversations with each other, and also to what questions they were asking me, and that I’d be grading them on effort more than whether they completed all six equations in class.

Fully a third of the class threw themselves at the hardest equation first. I gave them the answers; they know that the process is more important to me anyway and it’s useful for them to know if an answer is right before asking me about it. A couple of them refused to turn the paper in at the end of class, saying they were going to take it home and bring it back to me finished on Tuesday.

A lot of them came close, but they all ended up getting lost in the fractions, and one of them basically dared me to solve the question myself. I gotta admit, I was worried; one little calculation error was going to blow my credibility. But that is, in fact, the right answer, as ugly as it might be.

Nice to head into a long weekend on a high.

Time to admit it

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Okay, it’s only day seventeen, but maybe it’s time to stop knocking on wood: I am having an amazing time with this current group of kids, better than last year, which was a tremendously good year. I’m having literally zero discipline problems– one of the kids asked me the other day what my worst class was, and while I’d never tell a kid the answer (or at least give any answer other than “yours,”) the truth is I don’t have a worst class. Still. Surely, by now, one class should have emerged? Like, my first hour is my hardest, but that’s because I have a ton of special ed kids in that room and we don’t have enough staff in special education. I really should have a co-teacher in that group and I don’t. But it’s not behavioral difficulty, and it’s not even really disinterest difficulty– it’s that they’re really low and that’s hard to work with. That doesn’t make them a bad class, just a challenging one. I don’t mind a challenge.

I have never had a year of school where I didn’t have at least a small handful of kids that could make me happiest by not showing up to school. I don’t have a single kid who fits that description this year. My most ADHD kids are still nice. I had a couple of kids the first day who I had pegged as “I will either love you by the end of the year or you will be my worst enemy,” and they all straightened out already.

If this keeps up it’s going to be the best year of my career, and it’s not going to be close. There’s a hell of a lot of school left; there’s no doubt about that, and the end of September is always rough, and February-March is always rough; there are tougher times genuinely baked into the calendar that aren’t going to change. But I’m at the point where I feel like it would take some truly catastrophic transfers in to drag this crew down. I’m crossing my fingers.

I mean, hell, they took their first test of the year yesterday– do y’all remember the last time I used the phrase “first test of the year” around here and didn’t also use the words “shit the bed”? Because I don’t. I’m actually happy with the results. They were using their notes. I don’t know what the hell is going on.

I AM THE KING OF ALL BLOGS

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I would genuinely love to know what the longest active streak is (I’m sure it puts this to shame) and where I am in terms of, like, percentiles.

I swear I had something for this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, ReadingLeave a comment

I had a plan for tonight’s post, but after a conversation with my son I’ve decided to refine it further and write it another day. Unfortunately, that leaves me with not a lot other than bitching about how insanely fucking hot it is outside and various other forms of electronic begging for death.

Anyway, now that I’ve failed at that, time to go finish the last Robert Jordan book I ever have to read.