Matt's Homepage

I recently had a flashback to my own college days when The Gamers movie from Dead Gentlemen came up in my Youtube feed. No series has captured the personalities and real-life nonsense of 90’s and early 2000’s DnD playing with friends so well.

Sit down and give them a watch. This is what the internet was originally designed for. Not monetization and influencer videos, but sharing passions and having fun.

One of their follow-on movies:

Even in mid-2000’s people waxed nostalgic about old DnD:

and of course – the original Summoner Geeks:

There is a fabulous scene in Life of Brian where Brian is caught writing ‘Romans go home!’ on a wall. But his Latin is terrible so he makes a bunch of mistakes in his graffiti. He’s then accosted by a Roman soldier who exactly mimics the dressing down one would get by an overbearing Latin teacher. Even better – everything they discuss is100% grammatically accurate.

polýMATHY walks us through exactly what they were saying (if you don’t know any Latin):

It looks like one of Netflix’s most interesting interactive experiences, Bandersnatch, has been removed from Netflix. However, someone has decided to extract and put it up online at playbandersnatch.com. Go give it a playthrough before it’s likely removed.

“I’m in my 40’s now. When I was a kid, I used to have tons of my favorite books that I wanted to see made into movies. Now, in 2025, I hope the exact opposite for any story I love.”

I saw this quote on a movie buff forum and couldn’t agree more. Classic stories are butchered, re-imagined by people who don’t even know the source material, or reframed for ‘modern’ sensibilities.

We do have examples of amazing Lord of the Rings from Peter Jackson – and then abominations like the follow-up series on Amazon that shows the show runners don’t understand the basics of the source material nor the intent of the author that wrote it.

This nearly dialog-free short film from OTOY and director Carlos Baena uses de-aging tech to bid a farewell to the Captain Kirk – and Spock. The film was created with help from William Shatner and the Nimoy estate for the Roddenberry Archive

“I can’t believe my job is to make you feel good about yourself”

-Lawrence’s boss Alana

I Like Movies is a film about an naive, overly optimistic kid named Lawrence who is absorbed in the world of movies and his own ‘creative’ viewpoints. Unfortunately, he’s socially abrasive, clueless as to how the world/life works, and goes on about creative visions when he hasn’t even held a simple job or seems to make anything anyone wants to see. He shares too much to the point of embarrassing himself and his friends.

I think the movie hits a couple of important themes that are relevant today. First, that when we’re young we often embarrassingly think our thoughts and ideas are unique and amazing – only later to realize how cringe we really were.

Secondly, I think the quote from the boss nails what being a manager is like today – especially for those that grew up in the isolation of covid. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they’re struggling at a much higher rate than other generations – even when rated by their own peers. So the question is, how does one help those that are struggling like Lawrence along?

Did you know that Harlan Ellison sued and won both an out of court settlement and now appears in the credits of later prints of the 1984 Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator?

The 1964 Outer Limits episode ‘Soldier’ was written by Harlan Ellison and was loosely adapted from his 1957 short story ‘Soldier from Tomorrow‘. The similarities were so close that a settlement was reached despite James Cameron who disagreed with the ruling.

Give the original a watch and see just how close (and far) they were.