d100 police responses

god gotta shake these winter blues and throw up a blog-post.

d100 ways that the police respond to something

1. the street rumbles. and collapses. the police were trapped in the sewers beneath and they're now free.
2. cops are taking shits in nearby bathroom
3. cops immediately decide they need to consult a psychic
4. d
5. cops set up an astrolabe and begin consulting it. crime scene slowly becomes more and more about astronomy/ology as night progresses
6. evil cop demands everyone's shoes, steals them
7. cop breaks down door like kramer
8. cops very sneaky show up slowly poking their noses around corners
9. very scary not funny thing where the cops make you go through simon says or shoot you
10. cops slowly start deconstructing the house
11. cut to: police tape on the ground, serious detectives having a police procedural conversation, the interim elided over
12. cops start gossiping about you in front of you, picking apart your appearance and being snotty
13. cops more concerned about the serial killer who is said to be probably "close by"
14. cops eating lunch, try to get you to buy hoagies for the police hoagie sale
15. cops trying to sell raffle tickets and will only do what you want if you buy more and more tickets
16. one cop has his shoes untied and will fall over at comic time, gets really angry and will get violent 
17. cops were just playing paintball and file in with all their gear still on, with paint splotches, have grudges etc
18. frantic yelling and giant gorilla-like cop bursts into scene named Mongo, other cops have to calm it down 
19. cops are late to motocross, rival team shows up revving their bikes really loud outside crime scene
20. competitive putting using a glass and a putter to kill time
21. drinking tea out of big mugs using both hands
22. flash photography, blue latex gloves, gas tanks, heart rate monitor... sick people start showing up, seems like the flu's in season. travelling witch doctor-show sets up outside. purpose of the scene seems to have changed somewhat.
23. humiliating body searches of all present (good luck -ed)
24. police mislabel all evidence and cart it all off and are never seen from or heard ever again
25. everyone gets arrested, evidence is manufactured to pin it on random PC present
26. a great evil is afoot... police invite hooded figures to the scene and keep discussing "the warden"
27. redneck sherrif + barefoot deputies with shotguns
28. add'l evidence is uncovered which completely changes the case
1. murder weapon added/subtracted from scene (if one was present, subtracted, etc)
2. secret room with blood messages on the walls (or similar)
3. mutated half-alive fetus, parentage apparent, squirreled away at scene
4. evidence literally falls from sky
29. small meteorite lands near scene
30. fastfood delivery & subsequent argument
31. police horse freaks out and gets destructive, police refuse to euthanize it
32. supervillain is involved (see: http://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2019/01/d50-villains.html)
33. police accidentally break something vital and profusely apologize
34. detective taking over the case is covered in tattoos and seductive
35. cops are aliens
36. cops refuse to leave car, will not for any reason, talk through window etc
37. random object magnetized by lightning exactly like in The Court Jester (1955)
38. one cop is also a serial killer trying to deal with the conflicting parts of his identity and audibly goes through the motions.
39. cops blare really loud music from the car the whole time they're there
40. cop has native roots and uses a bow and arrow, facepaint, stereotypical native clue-gathering methods, listening to ground, voodoo etc
41. cops are ghost hunters
42. cops deeply hate each other 
43. small fire starts and will escalate if players dont do something
44. fantastically obese cop(s)
45. cops kinda gossipy and drinking appletinis 
46. scene is haunted and manifests blood on the walls / time loop / hallucinogenic ghost presence / items rearrange / curse distribution / demonic chanting
47. cops are satanists! 
48. K9 dog has foaming horrible rabies
49. cops are using messenger pigeons
50. Cop is one day away from retirement! 
51. serial killer/ other horrible person(s) is in disguise as a cop(s), (supervillain may be involved see #32)
52. SNAFU involving undercover police already at scene
53. cop is compulsive masturbator(s)
54. cops trying to sell drugs to PCs... a sting?
55. cops doin
1. coke
2. ketamine
3. ecstasy
4. methamphetamines
5. opiods
6. LSD
56. cops have regressed to a pre-modern state, alike cavemen
57. cop has massive weeping wound(s) no one acknowledges
58. cops are very nerdy and wheedly, pocket protectors, cokebottle glasses 
59. preggo ladycop goes into labor
60. cop is one of those mechs from Robocop (1987)
61. cop is Robocop
62. cops are babushka-wearing grandma cops
63. cops are forever on their phones 
64. cops are drunk gettin drunker
65. cops don't know how to use a computer! they need to though, could you help?
66. cops are totally competent in this case.
67. copgun goes off aciddentally at worst time
68. cops all have a seriously flu
69. none of the cops can read
70. dispatcher promises cops will show up but none ever, ever will
71. cops skin slowly changing colors
72. cops "smell" crime
73. cops are all terribly beautiful
74. dinosaurs show up
75. cops are compulsive gamblers
76. cops are greatly speculative about chess
77. cop mentions he has a single day until retirement
78. bomb squad robot shows up first, alone, due to scheduling error
79. cops are all terribly hungover
80. cops are in a band together and are kinda like Mystery Incorporated
81. bishonen detective
82. cop has chronic pain flareup and requires paramedic attention
83. cops are all actually ghosts
84. seemingly quite intelligent detective determined to fake evidence for own goals
85. cops arrive at wrong location and are unable to travel to correct one although dispatch will unceasingly attempt to coordinate this
86. cop has a phobia about flying bugs which arrive periodically, he freaks out, other cops have to calm him down, keeps happening
87. cops seem like they're really good genuinely kind friends to each other but commit terrible cruelties to each other as well
88. -100 : reroll

TRPG lessons from Dragon Quest: An INSTADEATH Listicle

Simple design tips... What is "enough?"

1. A dungeon that is simple, proceeds in stages, and has a simple puzzle (and random encounters) can be effective.

2. Extremely simple spacial positioning.

Having two groups, enemies and player characters, standing in lines opposite each other, and taking turns inflicting attacks or casting spells, can be enough. This is especially effective as a default positioning for battles. 

3. Spells can be extremely simple. 

Knock, Fireball, and Speak With Dead are great. 

4. Means of transportation tiers exploration.

It's a JRPG staple. Walk across the continent, then get a ship and go visit other continents and explore the sea. Maybe find portals between various places. Eventually you get an airship, which lets you visit floating islands or other planets or whatever.

It's a simple principle to apply. Less transportation, less settings. More transportation, more settings. 

5. Arbitrary Monsters

Monsters can, and should, be whatever. Meaningless details or additions can be handwaved or explained. A monster is an open-ended template which players KNOW how to deal with.

5a. corollary: can NPCs be anything??

6. Chasing after a big bad vs. simulating colonialism.

Instead of raiding indigenous peoples, pursuing an antagonist around the globe allows the players to be problem-solving-tourists aka traveling heroes. They need not pursue, but then bad things will happen. 

7. Nonspecific NPC Monotheism.

Having all or most of the NPCs worship a single, semi-mysterious deity has its advantages. There's a simple and uniting cultural touchstone everywhere the players look. The Goddess is good and the people who worship her (most people) are basically good. This contributes to Simple Ethics.

8. Simple ethics can be fine.

 An overtly evil antagonist will likely speed gameplay along.

9. Cooperating with monsters is easy as shit

You probably already knew.

10. What if there are already lit torches underground?

If you don't want to track light, why not have torches line the way? No one's going to complain.

The Counselor

Gauche in The Counselor: Bardem’s hair, the advertising interiors, Cameron Diaz styled into a black hole of charm, Brad Pitt looking back and forth while the music insists on petty melodrama. There’s a cocaine enthusiasm to the collection of talents, who are all metatextual failures. After enough viewings, the awkwardness starts to belong to the taste.

The Counselor is buying a diamond and entering a drug deal, his prospective gain a definite amount while his exposure extends through his fiancée. A white American participating in cartel wealth. Eventually the drugs return to cartel hands, and this repairs little.

Around the sewage truck, weapons, distances and vehicles produce short actions with permanent consequences. INSTADEATH: oh, this thing behaves according to rules, and I just fucked that up. There is no undo, and the understanding keeps coming as if it wasn't deserved. 

Melodramatic comedy fuzzes the metaphysics's nobility. The "car fucking" is the triumph of the film.  A mother wakes clutching her heart because the son has died; people live overt cliché. 

It reads as bad filmmaking. Humans approach irreversible consequence through embarrassing material culture and awkward behavior, without acquiring the dignity of the philosophical system they inhabit. Folly is gauche. 

SMOKESCREEN AI

 Yeah. I think “smokescreen AI” names something more specific than simply using AI despite its bad aesthetics.

The mechanism is: AI’s cringe becomes cover. The ugly, cliché, low-status surface gives you permission to move outside the cultural network whose judgments you already understand.

You know how your existing milieu reads things: what looks sophisticated, embarrassing, derivative, corporate, tasteful, politically suspect, etc. AI comes preloaded with extremely obvious violations of those standards—generic prose, glossy imagery, “AI slop,” weird enthusiasm, tech-culture corniness. So entering an AI-heavy space can initially feel like entering somewhere culturally beneath you or simply illegible.

But that ugliness functions as a smokescreen for network transition. You think:

I’m doing this cringe AI thing.

while what may actually be happening is:

I’m entering a social and cultural network whose status system I don’t yet know how to read.

That second experience is much more threatening. 

Drowning by Numbers

 Drowning by Numbers carries the cozy murder mystery through its own inversion into a lovely third imaginary reality. The comfort remains circular, nostalgic; Greenaway’s formal intelligence gives it cosmological significance.

The murders feel like blood sacrifices toward a spiritual gift, lightly celebrated by a coven of three women. Their decisions accumulate until the pattern creates something wider than the plot. I can’t even call it evil. The women begin to seem like the masters of reality; the man is this fat, drowning figure being disposed of.

There’s a soft misogyny here, beautiful and calming enough to suggest Taoism: the yielding woman manipulates the stolid man into his grave. The lightheartedness of that arrangement is spiritual. Death is leavening.

# TRASH TELEVISION: PRIMETIME BLAH BLAH

3.5 stars (ai-assisted writing from dictation)

*To Catch a Predator* is the most gauche operation possible. It is also aligned with destroying pedophiles, which gives its bad taste somewhere to hide. *Primetime* takes this thing and makes a color textbook out of it. This is Lance Oppenheim operating 24/7 to get his shot. The composition is so delicate, the attention to color so sustained, that I kept thinking I should be able to subsist on the excellent visuals. And then I would want the movie to fucking move.

The film goes through a series of tone-set pieces, people working on their identities inside this house where they catch predators. They’re all just chilling out in this house together. That’s part of the weird pleasure of it. The predators enter in an even enough mix that the movie doesn’t become too harsh to hang out with. We’re usually meeting them at the moment of presumed victory: they’ve arrived, they’re caught, we know how this goes. The show has already arranged the encounter so we can enjoy it. Oppenheim gives us time to enjoy the people arranging it.

And then there’s Pattinson’s voice. At the opening he says "I will undress you, and you will undress me" to the pedophile, and it's a moment of complete victory in filmmaking. I do viscerally enjoy Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen. Hansen already has this voice that makes him Hansen, and now Pattinson gets inside it, performs the performance. I first dismissed too much of this as scenery-chewing. The movie is wonderfully about his voice. But I can hear how good the voice is and still get sick of the man.

The decoys are doing another version of this work. There’s the guy who finds predators online and charms them through texts: the predator’s predator, the Judas goat. His sequence has this steamy, manga-like, buzzy excitement to it. He’s making somebody want to be there. The identity he supplies is fake; the wanting has to work. Hansen needs to be recognized immediately, and the decoy needs somebody to believe in a person who isn’t there. Between them they manufacture both sides of the encounter.

Which still leaves a lot of stupid jokes. Pattinson’s physical gags pile up, and eventually he seems to run out of energy. There’s the moment in body armor, standing in front of a window, that seems to quote *Batman*. I can see how Hansen making himself into this ridiculous figure belongs in the movie. But Pattinson’s performance isn’t good all the way through. God, it’s even badly directed at times, though. Fuck. It really is. Robert Pattinson is capable of doing bad. He’s not a fucking genie. He’s more like a clown.

*Nightcrawler* was a brilliant ride. I keep thinking there’s a version of *Primetime* with this much visual intelligence that is also exciting and well-paced. The relationships are shallow; the development is predictable; the comedy keeps arriving where I want something else to happen. People in the theater were laughing and I wasn’t. Calling the acting gauche, and then discovering that gaucheness is a theme, doesn’t make those minutes better. I demand that great art take great care at the absolute surface level. You should just feel affected. The movie has to do something with the time I’m giving it.

There is a moment when it absolutely does. One of the decoys is exposed to a predator’s penis, and he is clearly shaken by it. Someone gets their dick out, right? Something fucked up happens. I don’t remember seeing that particular kind of violation handled quite this way before. It’s something he can laugh off, perhaps, and something that clearly stays with him. "That happens to all of us"- the Producer.

*To Catch a Predator* essentially brought back the pillory. That’s the pleasure sitting inside its presumed victory: we get to watch somebody face us. In *Primetime*, the district attorney kills himself before facing the pillory. The film spends time on his turmoil, enough that he becomes quasi-sympathetic. The weight of that acting feels like a counterbalance to the gaucheness elsewhere. 

Then there’s *Rent*. “Seasons of Love.” In a phone call, the district attorney has the opportunity for a little more joy with his fake partner, his fake underage partner. That last fact keeps making the tenderness awkward. The voice he wants to hear belongs to the operation catching him. Still, he wants to hear it. The song feels like the gauche center of the movie: hopeful but dark, cynical but also legitimate. 

“the vulgar sentiment becomes capable of carrying genuine pity.” - ChatGPT

I felt guilt afterward, but in a kind of gentle way. That’s a really good outcome for a movie I’d found this irritating. In retrospect, I appreciate it more. There’s so much good composition throughout it. It’s difficult to make a judgment that gives that its due without starting to excuse every dull scene. 

x

I can imagine *Primetime* working as a household cinematic object. You can hang out with this movie: take a break, walk around, come back, let the voice and the color fill the room again. I haven’t done that yet. It might be wonderful the second time. Or this might also be a litany of excuses for a slow movie: I have a ton of respect for it, and it was kind of a drag. 

PRIMETIME Review

 Primetime (2026) eschews a conventional plot for a series of tone-set pieces, following various characters through similar struggles with identity inside the pressure cooker of To Catch a Predator.

It’s honestly kind of badly written. One of the clearest signs is the overreliance on comedy, which appears forthrightly in Robert Pattinson’s performance: his Chris Hansen is stuffed with physical gags. Normally I wouldn’t complain, except I eventually found myself getting sick of all the stupid jokes.

I appreciate a tone poem, but I also get bored in the theater very easily. If I had a reasonable attention span, like my friends, I probably could have subsisted on the excellent visuals. This is Lance Oppenheim operating 24/7 to get his shot. The movie is a color textbook, so delicately composed that its cinematography is an obvious landmark for the year.

But the cinematography doesn’t completely relieve the problems: slow pacing, overreliance on comedy, shallow relationships, predictable character development.

I viscerally enjoy Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen, but there’s no other way to put it: this is a chomping-at-the-scenery movie, and it’s also somewhat boring.

★★★½