|
 I was hoping to have a Sherlock Holmes review, but snow kept us at home this Christmas day, so it's postponed for the time being. For what it's worth, "Ain't it Cool News" seems to think it's decent enough, and, thankfully, both reviews do mention Holmes using his genius to solve a perplexing mystery. If that's included, then I'll most likely come away satisfied.
But I did get to see the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and without giving anything away, I can say a few things: I'm sorely going to miss Tennant, though he's bringing his Doctor to a close that feels complete rather than abruptly interrupted. But on a completely different note, I think this is the first episode of Doctor Who to mention a sitting U.S. President by name and use audio clips of his speeches as part of the episode's dialogue. And while I'm somewhat up on my UK politics and the views expressed about America via their topical comedy program(me)s, either someone has an overabundance of expectation regarding the U.S. President's effect on the worldwide economy, or the scriptwriter was being sarcastic (perhaps making a sideways dig at views held in Britain?). But either way, it was odd seeing (sort of) a "real" politician in an episode of 'Who, since normally the politicians are fictional archetypes made to either get killed by someone taking over or they are whoever is taking over, but in disguise.
Anyway, a good cliffhanger, and I can't wait to see how they follow up the tantalizing final few minutes on New Year's Day.
Normally, this would get a place in the linkdump, but I can't get it out of my head. This is UPular, (in case that kills your 'net connection, here's a YouTube link) an ambient mix-song created by snippets of the Pixar movie, "Up." For those not familiar with the work of the tunesmith, "Pogo," he started out with this ditty called "Alice," and his latest effort was either commissioned or endorsed by Pixar itself. Though just meant to be a soundscape (picking syllables that just hit notes rather than form a musical verse), I keep wanting to sing along somehow.
Now I have to go dig out my poor Honda, entombed in unassembled snowmen. While I frost my goatee, here's a video-heavy linkpile:
- Presented as a sort of religious tract is this amusing guide to the Creation of the World of Grayhawk, the D&D campaign setting. See how many of the old gaming supplements you own from which they pulled the artwork.
- A Christmas-themed (but still challenging) puzzler: Light Up the Christmas Tree. Rotate the wire/channel bits to get power to every light.
- If you're out in the ice and snow, be very careful, or you might wind up crunching your fenders on YouTube.
- Last post, UK comedian Bill Bailey generated a techno remix by making a comment on a news quiz. Apparently, something talked about in one of his concerts actualized in real life. I wonder if he's that kid Ron Howard portrayed in "The Twilight Zone," but instead of being overtly malicious, he went into comedy?
- I think I need one of these Star Trek webcams. That way, I can pretend there are little people in the ship that fear my wrath, like in the original series episode, Catspaw.
- In a similar vein, someone in Japan has constructed models of the USS Enterprise-A, Battleship Yamato, and Voyager as working remote-control submarines. I almost want an in-ground pool now...
- Two engineers try out Christmas Laser Beam cats. Pew-pew, indeed.
- This strikes me as a "Grow" game combined with an offbeat "defense" game: Tetraform gives you the power to click on an enemy followed by your planet (not recommended) or another enemy ship to make them attract each other until they collide and explode. Works well for missiles, too. |
|
Merry Christmas everyone!
 |
|
Hey, merry Christmas from Vancouver!
This is a bit disingenuous, it's been unseasonably dry and mild in Vancouver this last week, but I'm sure it will be dark and wet again in no time.
Has everyone seen A Year Without Santa Claus? I think that it maybe didn't make it on TV up in Canada when I was a kid, I didn't see it until a few years ago,
So I've opted out of Christmas this year (I'm having kind of A Year Without Santa Claus myself, hur hur) and it is a real relief. I'm staying in Vancouver by myself and I'm away from my family for the first year ever. On Christmas Eve I made myself a lil' chicken and went alone to a bar. On Christmas morning I'm eating eggs with back bacon and playing videogames.
Hope things are going nice for you guys this holiday season!Listening to: WFMU's The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling |
|
And, with the house cleared and shit wrapped and an unwise number of wine bottles emptied, I’m out. See you on the other side of little Winterval. Have a good break. Try not to stab anybody important.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
 For those unacquainted with the role-playing game mentioned in this week's FFN, there's a quick run-down of the basics for Synnibarr (as well as a few other, ah, "interesting" sourcebooks) at the RPG.net Wiki. There are even a few for sale via Amazon at various prices (and it managed to get a three-star review from someone, which seems a tad generous). I first heard of it thanks to this image from one of many motivational poster threads.
It's Christmas Eve Eve, and we're supposed to drive an hour or two on Christmas day, so I fully expect the force field surrounding our city to fail and allow in the blizzard that's supposed to blow through. I think I can say that the holiday has well and truly morphed from what Norman Rockwell envisioned into an event where I include visits with three to six other families (perhaps more, depending on how you count) and my big present is Cristi and I deciding to finally replace our 20-year-old washer & dryer (under mild protest. I mean, if you don't drag the sheets over the rust spots, they work as well as ever, right?). My siblings and I all agree that we won't break our checking accounts buying gifts for one another, but instead we buy either "group gifts" (food & drink) or donate to a charity in their name along with getting their children something fun to play with. However you celebrate or whatever you do, I hope everyone has some fun and safe time off to enjoy a little relaxation and something good to nosh on. And if you somehow think there's not enough stress, you could always decide to hit the malls on December 26th. :)
Or you could buy a T-shirt that I whipped up and somehow forgot to mention: LoLCats, HO!" Somehow, redubbing an episode of "Thundercats" in LoLspeak sounds somewhat intriguing, especially if you could make it seem that the mutants were confused by it and that it was Mum-Ra's annoyance at it that fueled his desire to destroy them. :)
Back to the usual items of interest: I've long told people upset by actors that say things they disagree with to separate the thespian's work from their private lives. Tom Cruise made that very difficult with quite a few well-publicized antics (though one of the remixes that resulted was quite amusing). That said, this trailer for his next film looks like a fun time. He may be kinda messed up off-screen, but he's got talent.
Here's something for the fans of British comedian Bill Bailey and "Have I Got News for You." Last week, Liberal Democrat MP Charles Kennedy was on the show, apparently the first MP to do so after a scandal involving other members of Parliament claiming some rather outlandish things as expenses (I believe the more famous ones were a duck pond, a moat, and a tower on a castle). Anyway, Bill was goading Mr. Kennedy into saying his colleagues were, ah, "less than honest" and suggested it would be remixed on YouTube and become a hit. Well, it's not on YouTube, but the mix does exist (using Bill's voice, samples from previous jokes about monkeys and octopuses, and the show's theme music).
Now I must away to help Cristi wrap [DATA EXPUNGED] for the nephews, so until Christmas Day's posting, here's:
- A bit of "hard" science for fiction to argue over: ten ways to travel in deep space and the physics of space battles.
- A guy decided to see what his cat, Kookoo, got up to during the day, so he put a GPS receiver on Kookoo's collar and compiled a video of the results.
- And since the season is 'tis-ing, from the nuts at "Everything is Terrible," here's The Majesty of Christmas Music. Sanity checks may be required.
- This is the time of year when people forward that text file about how fast Santa's sleigh has to go to reach every house and what happens to him and the reindeer after physics are applied (it's not pretty). So instead, I'm posting what most likely happened to the Ewoks after the second Death Star blew up in close proximity to the moon they were living on.
- Two rather offbeat holiday traditions: watching Donald Duck in Norway on Christmas Eve and watching a a sketch called 'Dinner for One' in Germany for New Years (at least, as of 2005).
- How about a new holiday tradition: Infectionator: Xmas Edition where you can not only generate zombies, but you can try to have Santa join your army of the undead.
- It's all a matter of opinion of course, though what intrigued me about the worst comics of the year (of which this is the second page) is that the winner(?) was a bizarre storyline from the "Mark Trail" comic strip.
- A coffee grinder might seem aggressive enough for many coffee drinkers, but this espresso machine is for those who find Chuck Norris a bit wimpy.
- The Vatican now says that his holiness is now his copyrightedness. Get to those "Pope Rooms" at Buca Di Beppo before they're closed down, folks!
- Artist of engine-driven oddities, Stan Mott would have surely been a huge tabletop gamer. I would love to see a "Car Wars" supplement based on his work. :)
- We end with a game called Space Ace, though it has nothing to do with Don Bluth. It's a flavor of the old vector-graphics "Lunar Lander" games, except you're flying through a maze of tunnels collecting dots while trying not to touch your highly volatile hull against the walls.
|
|
Oh my goodness you finally get to see what these guys look like, cool!
The second OoT books came in this week! They look PERFECT. Together on the shelf, books 1 and 2 take up an amount of space that I am seriously impressed by. All preorders are being packed up and will go out on Monday, and I will have some pictures up with Sunday's update, or via twitter before then.
This week I found a game called Machinarium and bought it and played all the way through. It's a very well-designed and difficult game, and it's currently on sale! Let me suggest that you play the demo, on the site.
Hope you are all having lovely holidays and a generally fine end of the year. Seeyou. |
|
Musician/writer Christine Hart felt it necessary to preserve this Twitter exchange from earlier in the year:
I have just been informed via the power of Twitter that I’m on io9’s 2009 Science Fiction Power List, alongside, um, Lady Gaga. Actually, it’s kind of an interesting list — and an interesting, if peculiar, concept. Doubtless, by the time you read it, the comments section will have filled with snark. But the article itself is worth a read (not least because it includes Lady Gaga. I think even Bill Gibson was talking about that last video).
I’ve just been informed that Bleeding Cool will be broadcasting all through Xmas Day.
Me? I will doubtless still be ruminating on the fact that five minutes ago I was selecting children’s books for my daughter, and that apparently with the passage of no time whatsoever I am now wrapping a MOCK THE WEEK: UNCUT DVD for her. Not sure how she went from Maurice Sendak to Frankie Boyle yelling "cunt" overnight, but suddenly she’s 14 and arguing with me over rap/rock, guitarists and what the best track on the Florence & The Machine album was. It’s brilliant, frankly.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
 |
|
This is me with local musician Carolina Fasalo of The Voronas. Caz dumped a load of old photos on to her Facebook account and turned this up. Last summer, I think?
I was reading this interview with David Simon the other day — he gives good interviews, see if you can find the one he did with THE BELIEVER magazine sometime — and something he said stuck with me a little bit. As it often does in Simon interviews, as he’s good with a bon mot or two. I’ve hacked some connective tissue out to present it as a complete thought:
There would be a series of planning sessions. First, at the beginning of every season, we did a sort of retreat with the main writers, the guys who were going to be on staff the whole year. We’d discuss what we were trying to say… we weren’t cynical about having been given ten, 12, 13 hours — whatever we had for any season from HBO. All of that was an incredible gift.
So goddamn it, you better have something to say. That sounds really simple, but it’s actually a conversation that I don’t think happens on a lot of serialized drama. Certainly not on American television. I think that a lot of people believe that our job as TV writers is to get the show up as a franchise and get as many viewers, as many eyeballs, as we can, and keep them.
What we were asking was, “What should we spend 12 hours of television saying?”
Which, yes, should sound blatantly obvious. But it’s easy, when working in fast and deadline-intensive serial formats, to forget that bit: to trust to the process of pulp writing and the form’s innate effect of whatever you’re really interested in leaking out into the work regardless. It’s easy to forget what you turned up for.
It’s also an interesting process note. A good 95% of longform serials, I’d guess, turn up not knowing what they want to talk about. Sometimes they don’t discover what they showed up to talk about until the third or fourth season. And I don’t mean so much the working out of what’s now called "show mythology," the actual overarcing storyline — and we can all name shows that suddenly realised they’d payed out all the rope they had and they didn’t know where the plot went next. I mean the serials where they finally open their mouths and nothing comes out. They made the show because they were allowed to make the show.
In other news, Karl Urban has apparently been signed to RED. This brings the cast up to something like the eight thousand most popular actors in the world.
Tonight I am mostly clearing the house. Not enough strength left in me for proper writing. I’d actually really like to be digging into the outline I wrote for the GRAVEL film, and fixing all the stuff in it that looks broken. I’m delivering it at the end of the second week in January, so there’s plenty of time, and it’s actually in reasonably good shape overall. But the thing about distance from a thing — and this is actually not bad advice for any new writer — is that it gives you essential and often surprising perspective once you’ve been away from it for a few days. Walking away from something for a few days or a week is sometimes the best possible thing you can do for a piece. Again, not something we always have time for in the deadline game.
I’d also like to be working on the animated series I have in development, but, like I said. Burned way the fuck out. So I’m going to content myself with clearing the house, catching up on my RSS feeds, scheming about getting a new phone out of Vodafone, and making a few notes on loose ideas. Proper writing can wait a couple of weeks, now.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
One of the most heartwarming moments in Christmas special history. An angry Santa belittling a father for his son's supposed disability. Is it just me, or is Santa a dick in this special? I don't just mean the requisite distrust of red noses. Or him being awful to Rudolph up until the very moment he realizes he can use him. What about when the elves are all together, singing a song about how great Santa is, and he totally disses them? He's even rude to the Mrs.! Well, it's a very stressful job. And that much weight gain so quickly is heading him straight for a heart attack, so we can cut him some slack. |
|
Very nearly completing the first volume, at Bleeding Cool:
(And there’s an error in there that should read: "…crossing the four hundred miles from Berlin to Metz")
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
 Marmaduke. This is a comic I thought was occasionally funny 'round about when I was eight. Of course, there were no webcomics back then, and if you wanted any graphical representations of humor, you got your folks to buy books for you or you got nothin'. And nothin' was what you got with Marmaduke, pretty much. The premise is that a Great Dane does something outrageous (and that's "outrageous" in a 1950's media sense of the word, the furthest extent of which would be catching a glimpse of a madien's slip as a breeze ruffles her calf-length skirt) in one panel and the humans involved explain why it's funny. However, I'm just an amateur when it comes to explaining Marmaduke, so thankfully someone else does so on a regular basis, as does another someone else.
Why do I bring up a single-panel vortex of un-funny on the comics page? They're making a Marmaduke movie. I'm not kidding. The the trailer is on this page at Slashfilm. And it looks like they're "updating it for a new generation" or something. Either he's going to talk in the film, or this is a "Kangaroo Jack" style trailer where the animal star only speaks in ads. But quality wise, it really shouldn't matter. This film didn't have to be called "Marmaduke," because nobody was out there wishing for Marmaduke to make a big-screen appearance. Any "big dog" character would have had the same effect on the bottom line, the studio wouldn't have had to pay the comic syndicate a dime, and my head wouldn't hurt thinking about the other films that must be in development based on "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith," "The Lockhorns," and "Ziggy." In fact, I can think of several comic strips that would make better movies than "Marmaduke," under certain conditions:
1. The Far Side. Already proven to be watchable in "Tales from the Far Side," this would be the animated movie for families where the grown-ups are nerds and the kids are ones you'd suspect of liking David Lynch if they knew who he was. How it would work: Gary Larson must write it or pick the cartoons used as source material. Further, it's not going to be a huge hit in the box office, but it will sell steadily on DvD forever, like a Monty Python movie. Also, the little 'bits' making it up will circulate on YouTube until the end of time.
2. Calvin & Hobbes. If there's one comic strip just about everyone wishes hadn't stopped, it was Bill Waterson's epic about a boy terror and his imaginary(?) friend, a stuffed tiger. They should have hucked "Dennis the Menace" when looking to the funnies and picked up Calvin, but... How it would work: Give it to Pixar and let them work on it without interference. Send Waterson to them in a locked crate so they can study him at leisure. If anyone tried making this in to a live-action film, it would fail so hard that audiences would be killed by the shrapnel.
3. Bloom County and/or Doonesbury. I put these two in one category for the "how it would work" section. Bloom County was one of the first newspaper strips to start doing things that a lot of webcomics now do on a regular bases: Introducing aliens, mad science, random celebrities, etc. and still making it all work instead of looking like the author is dredging the bottom of the creativity well. Doonesbury, for all the criticism lobbed at it from its political targets, had some really good and poignant runs. Alongside "Snoopy," Zonker Harris was one of my favorite comic characters ever, and I discovered his uncle Duke long before I ever heard of Hunter S. Thompson. How it would work: In both cases, making any kind of movie from this would have to be set in its heyday. That means no post-hiatus Trudeau and no "Outland" Breathed. These are the only projects I could think of that might do better without their authors, allowing directors who are fans of the features in their prime to do stories set in the 70's and 80's using the casts of these features.
And of course, there are loads of webcomics out there that deserve a whole string of feature films more than Marmaduke does, starting with Girl Genius getting a three-picture deal with Peter Jackson directing.
The second movie trailer I saw that crushed the other half of my soul was the one for 'Cats & Dogs 2.' The first film looked like it was almost a good idea which got saddled with lame jokes that sounded like they came from a Disney "made for our cable channel" movie with voiced-over puppies. The sequel appears to not only continue the trend, but seems, in spots, to suffer from a lower budget. I can pick out several "stuffed animal we're supposed to think is real" shots, and they re-use the "my owner is a crazy cat person" gag for the villain... again. But at least its a "new" franchise and not a remake, I suppose. And the writers (or maybe just the guy who came up with the title) have seen at least one classic James Bond film...
But all is not gloom and doom. I listen to very little music radio anymore, and when I was doing so recently, I heard a rather jaunty tune on a local "alternative" station (which they do tend to live up to; they don't sound like anything else on my dial, but I do live in Kansas City, so there you go) called "Fireflies." It's a synth-pop feel-good piece of bubblegum, and so I thought I'd share. Looking it up on Wikipedia, I saw that it had been a top Billboard hit, so I'm probably quite late to the party, mostly because I've been busy chasing kids off of my lawn. In hunting down the video, I also came across a one-man acapella version that was pretty decent as well.
I just realized that I've been very lax in getting new issues of ps238 up in the store, and that'll be rectified sometime tomorrow. In other comic happenings, I'm informed that North 40 was nominated for an award at Comicmonsters.com, with voting starting in a few days if I read the site correctly. The juxtaposition of the nominees' subject matter with the festive season doth please my ironic bits. I think if you win, you're given the soul of one of the other contestants... or a night's stay in a haunted asylum. I wonder if there's a cash equivalent? :)
While I hire a witch to help with the voting (what could go wrong?), here's some mystic portals to other realms:
- I'm a special effects nut from way back, starting with Ray Harryhausen and blue screen. But it's almost scary how often new techniques are used in seemingly mundane scenes. This is to preface you for this demo reel from Stargate Studios, showing how often their talents come into play in popular TV shows and movies.
- Even though his colleagues have been calling him "Sir" for some time, Patrick Stewart is to be knighted. Would that make him Sir Captain, Sir?
- A British court has ruled that Stormtrooper costumes from Star Wars aren't "sculpture," which enjoys 75 years of copyright, but "industrial design" that only gets 15 years, which means the guy who designed the helmets in 1976 can keep doing selling them.
- Way of an Idea is a puzzle game where the goal is to foster an idea in the head of a scientist by guiding an apple in its descent towards his head.
- Impressive stop-motion animation in Western Spaghetti.
- The "Snuggly" blanket-with-sleeves was apparently involved in a road accident with Underoos and they couldn't figure out which part went where.
- Penny-Arcade is getting started on what appears to be a short holiday series, though it's a little Illithid for some tastes.
- A classic ice-cutting-to-save-vikings game gets another installment in Icebreaker: The Gathering.
- Who knew the use of a tape measure could be a superpower? I think he may have found inspiration from a classic XKCD strip.
- Try your skills at Eeniebounce: Bounce your smiley face, collect all of the stars, and rebound off of numbered and colored platforms a specified number of times to progress. It's harder than it looks.
- And we close with something for all you holiday bakers out there (myself included): Gourmet magazine's favorite cookie recipes from 1940 through 2008.
|
|
oh god
|
Dec. 21st, 2009 @ 10:22 pm
|
|---|
|
The week between Christmas and New Year's is traditionally the lowest-traffic week of the year for my site, and I'm gonna be out of town anyway, so I thought I might try something a little different this year. Here's a teaser for my idea:
I've already got the basic idea for the story and will hopefully start working on it before we drive down to Maryland (one advantage of driving down is I can actually bring my big Cintiq with me) for the holiday. Of course, going over my outline and idea list, this might end up being MORE work than the usual QC strips >.<
So uh I no promises yet I guess, but hopefully I won't puss out and will actually get this done. |
|
Well, nearly. We ran into a blizzard north of Church End, east of the Gallows Green Road (love the place names up-county – Bacon End and Butcher’s Pasture are in the same area). It slicked a small, winding country lane already made treacherous by packed sheet ice. And then we hit a pothole and that was it, we were planing. Up over the kerb and headed for a low wall with a deep ditch behind it. Luckily, mounting the kerb gave us the traction we needed to pull round with a foot to spare. That was fun. Drove on, to find a car buried in a ditch at the next junction.
Oh, and the back of the kitchen flooded the other day. I’m starting to get the sense that 2009 wants to finish me off before it dies of old age. A calendrical unit yelling "I’m taking you with me, you bastard!" from its vanishing final paper bunker marked December, every spent day a room deleted from the structure until 2009 is finally huddled in one small box marked 31 and screaming obscenities in stark terror.
All of which was probably an episode of Grant’s DOOM PATROL.
This is the new issue of COILHOUSE. Delighted to see Kristamas Klousch on the cover. It goes on sale on the 22nd. This will be the link you need.
So, having lost even more time to trying to staunch an apparently endless flow of meltwater through my windows, I have to now write DO ANYTHING #026 and FREAKANGELS 0082, because Paul’s just caught up to me. And then I’m calling it Done for the year. I’ve really got nothing left in me this year. Not intending to do anything more than scribble in a notebook and write the occasional piece here until Jan 5.
(FREAKANGELS will be on a skip week this week, because Xmas Day falls on Friday. If we had any sense, we’d skip New Year’s Day too.)
Fuck you, 2009.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
Here's an hour-long, enjoyably digressive podcast I did with Ken Plume.
|
|
Hide your Mondays and season your lasagnas, because it's time for a bad Garfield party! Submit yours in the comments!
Ryan Estrada
Jerzy Drodz
Katie Cook
Lots more listed in the comments! |
|
Very happy with how these pages turned out, and I had to give you four to put us at this particular stopping place, oh my goodness.
Today you should read this fantastic little comic by Tom Herpich.
Huge amounts of snow all over the east coast, including here in Asheville. Power has been out a bit, but has returned in time for this update. Happy snow days to all of you. |
|
 "Honey Maid" has turned on us. Like all people getting up in years, the Maid is getting smaller. This might seem an odd thing for me to harp on, but wifey-poo has this great (and incredibly simple) recipe for toffee bark, (minus the nuts, sometimes with cinnamon) and it calls for graham crackers as its "crust" (she's also a "name brand" shopper, so it might take surgery to switch her to another crispy carbo), which was fine... until this year. The old crackers, about 1/8 of an inch wider, fit perfectly in the rimmed baking sheets we were wont to use. Now, cracker surgery has to be performed to get a "wall-to-wall" fit, which just adds to the stress of holiday entertaining. Were this a recipe where one could scarf raw cookie dough as an emotional salve, that would be one thing, but these are graham crackers: they need other stuff to be edible*. So Nabisco had better fess up and fix this problem or the torrent of complaints will no doubt destroy their baked-good empire.
* after you reach a certain age, that is. Kind of like how you stop eating vanilla wafers unless they're used as a topper for some kind of viscous pudding-based organism.
Sorry. Sugar rush. Too much peanut brittle (on sale near every freakin' cash register for a buck a box... right next to the chocolate covered cherry cordials. I'm doomed). Anyway, since I'm having to fend off addiction, I've got something that could return long-vanquished monkeys to a few backs. Among the computer game deals I saw this week was one from "Good Old Games," the place I acquired the first two "Fallout" titles: You can get a metric ton of Might & Magic for about twenty bucks. Somewhere, in my deep past, are the graph paper maps I made for the original M&M game on the Commodore 64. I even used colored pencils to denote which part of the map was mountain, which was forest, etc. I loved that game, as it was about as close as you could come to D&D on the computer back then, but also because it didn't try to steer you away from danger. The whole world was open, pretty much, and my 6th level party happened upon a dungeon that led to some kind of major demon convention. I got to read the room description right before they wasted every one of my characters (probably for not having a pre-reg 4-day badge). I also recall wondering why my cleric, who I had casting "raise dead" spells every other minute, kept dying in his sleep, requiring me to hit the nearest temple. Apparently, there's a cost for bringing people back from the grave, and my formerly youthful holy man was now over a hundred years old. I remember thinking that was kind of awesome. Then I made more maps, and I don't remember much else until "Doom" came out, I think...
And speaking of games, the holidays have hit the two superhero MMOs. In the City of Heroes Winter Event, all of the old classics are back (snow beasts, candy cane collection), and so is the skiing. That dratted ski slope was something I just couldn't get the hang of, even when playing late at night where nobody could see me eventually miss a curve and plummet to my super-doom.
Over at "Champions Online," they've got an event that shares roots in CoH (large boxes you open that usually earns you an attack from something lurking within) but with an hourly-spawning villain (hourly for the whole "world." Players monitor several feeds to find out which instance the master bad guy has appeared in) and action figure pieces to collect. Unfortunately, as there are five or so figures players want, and they all have three pieces, and the pieces are hard to come by, the chat window scrolls by like the ticker on CNN crossed with an auction house Twitter stream. More disturbingly, it appears to snow indoors in some places. There are "charities" your player can support by giving up game cash, and some heroic players are donating to real-world charities for each "gift" you send them via the game's e-mail system. Some of the aforementioned boxes give you items like a Holiday CD or a pair of Festive Socks, and they can be donated to raise actual funds for causes. On a geek-reference note, I was delighted to see that the "Matching Pen and Pencil" item has "just the thing I need, how nice" as it's description. I love that song.
Back to movies and "livin' the dream." A while back, I linked to a short film shot by a budding filmmaker in Uruguay who showed alien spacecraft and robots demolishing buildings and generally getting all 1950's invasion in everyone's face. That tale has a happy ending as Sam Raimi has hired the kid to make a $30 million feature film! Also from the same alert reader (thank you, Mike!), Stephen King will let you option any of his short stories for a dollar, provided you're an aspiring filmmaker or student. Any future Frank Darabonts in the house?
So now that you know to ask for a high-def camera equipment for Christmas, let's look at what the 'net has for us this weekend:
- Need to make a stocking stuffer and you have extra yarn lying around? How about crocheting a 'Yip-Yip' Muppet alien?
- What's the weather like where you are? No, I mean, what's it like in 'Star Wars' terms?
- The new "Star Trek Online" game has Zachary Quinto lending some of his vocal talent.
- Speaking of "Star Trek," no longer can the show be ribbed for always dismantling the communicators in the first ten minutes, because (language warning) just about every movie and TV show does it now.
- A fast-paced simple (yet sometimes challenging) time-waster: Obey the Game. Try to pass a hail of mini-games where you either follow the instructions or do the opposite, depending on what you're ordered to do.
- A rather amusing list of (probably college dorm-based) 4th edition D&D spells. I especially like #56.
- "Lipdub" films, of massive numbers of people lip-syncing to a song, are nothing new... unless you filmed the whole thing in reverse. Whoa.
- It's "Spot the Difference" time with Goldilocks: Twisted.
- A classic sci-fi remake ("Day of the Triffids) and it's got Eddie Izzard with a gun? This had better be on BBC America or there will be a terse letter or two!
- And just because I like flying saucers, here's a game called Moo Beam. Guide your flying saucer to the next cow to abduct without flying off of the screen.
|
|
Tiiiired. Sitting here listening to Pocahaunted and chugging coffee in order to stay lucid enough to do a GRAVEL phone conference set for 1.30am. This week’s been utterly buggered — you may have noticed the silence here — by a member of the family being rushed into hospital early in the week, which has turned everything into bubbling chaos and is necessitating runs to the hospital, rescheduling, etc. And then the snow hit, turned into two inches of white stuff sitting on three inches of ice, and Britain shut down because it is now a country of weaklings and jabbering genetic wreckage who shit themselves when the sky moves.
GRAVEL phone conference with my producers is to set the storyline. I’ve spent what little time I’ve had this week putting all my notes in order. Which is how I ended up writing the line "Bill, you’re kind of persona non fucker around here."
Also, at the top of the week, I wrapped the last few pages of ULTIMATE COMICS IRON MAN ARMOR WARS #4, which is one of the more ridiculous titles that I haven’t invented myself. Sadly, the Marvel office chose to ignore the alternate titles I wrote at the top of each script. I liked IRON MAN: HUMAN SEX JEEP the best.
Had a conversation with David Bogart at Marvel about the future of the NEWUNIVERSAL: STORMFRONT project there that got stalled when my computer and backups were destroyed. Should be sorted in a few months. I think Dave’s official title at Marvel is Grand Inquisitor or Witchfinder General or something, but I’ve known him pretty much since he started out in the business, and, frankly, it’s always nice to know that there’s a guy in that office who will never try to screw me over. Dave will look after me.
Or, of course, I will have him killed. I know lots of people in New York. I mean, trust is good, but insurance is better, right?
If I can just get a few more pages on other things out over the next two days, then from Monday I am done with 2009, and anyone who doesn’t like it can bite my muckpump.
More coffee.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
gugger_fane's Friends Page
