Old Skool Nostalgia

I was doing a computer back up and I found some old pdfs of Chainmail and 1st ed D&D (little brown books) that I bought at Drive Through RPG (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php) back when WOC was selling all the old TSR stuff in pdf several years ago. I was glancing through and I got a bit nostalgic:

Remember when there were only 3 classes (Fighting Man, Magic-User, and Cleric)?
Remember when there were only men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits?
Remember when all weapons only did 1d6?
Remember when there were no prestige classes? No splat books? Green large print character sheets? Only one blue stapled together rulebook?

Those were simpler, magical, times for me. When my imagination filled in what my character carried and no need for an Arms and Equipment Guide or encumbrance . One set of dice (the DM's). No miniatures. No multiple copies of rulebooks and laptops filled with rules. The DM was law. He set my imagination in motion and anything he said was cannon. I lived the adventure in my head. My mind's eye saw my Prince Valiant like fighter (he didn't even have a name) fight terrible goblins and scary animated skeletons each encounter a near-character-death experience. 45 minutes of excitement until I had to get off at my bus-stop. The thrill of my first real game session that lasted an evening! I cherish those first role-playing experiences and miss the simplicity and innocence/nativity of rules. Part of me wishes to go back to 1983...wipe my mind of all things rules, game systems, business of gaming, marketing, popular opinion, media, and movies and to experience it all again for the first time and FEEL the magic again.

Props to the old Skoolers Gygax and Arneson. I met them both before they passed and that I treasure. I even gamed with Dave Arneson back in the day at Origins. They were guys like me just wanting to have fun and experience the magic.
My first D&D book, $2 at the Montgomery Wards mail order damages store:

Swanky new Tron art

Apparently there's a playable online version of Space Paranoids, the fictional game seen in the original Tron. Haven't tried it yet, but here's the website for it.

The main thing is, it's got hidden codes that reveal new screenshots and behind-the-scenes art from the sequel. Conveniently, these goodies have been collected HERE

Samples:

Toodlepip, Geocities style

GO HERE FOR AWESOME!

And you can "Geocities-ize" any site WITH THIS

Probably another Sky Captain fiasco...

...but this CGI demo reel of a retro, 30s-style spaceship is kinda neat. It's for a Buck Rogers web series that's licensed but also sort of a fan project. I give at a 5% chance of being decent, but I do like me some retro spaceships.

Ocean's Eleven... in Space?

"Sizzle reel" for a proposed British heist show set in space in the 2060s. Looks like fun.

I must confess: I've never read DUNE

But I'm mesmerized by this standalone adaptation of a quiet scene from it, courtesy fave comic artist, Paul Pope. It was inspired by the constraints of his work in DC's Wednesday Comics, a weekly where each creative team had a single page of a "Sunday Funnies"-style newspaper as their chapter.

CLICK TO READ!



Here's Pope talking about it:

I've always been struck by the taciturn Nietzschean aspects of M'uad Dib's character as a leader. One of Frank Herbert's points in DUNE was a warning-- beware of charismatic heroes. When entrusted with great power, they can do great damage to a civilization. Even a brief sweep of history can illustrate this point.

I wanted to try applying the lessons learned from the Wednesday Comics experience to a different subject, here finding a source which would be difficult to illustrate as a page of comics, given that there is very little suggested action. I find that with the format of the Sunday Comics page, one must condense the plot and action to the briefest yet most vivd bursts of information available-- there is a lot of space on the page for the illustrations to really overwhelm the reader/viewer, but there isn't a lot of space for story development in the sense of how we'd develop a plot or work up dialogue for a typical comic book page. In a comic book, one page may be well drawn or well written, but it is still just a single facet of a larger whole. One page can be preceded or followed by another, but no one page carries the entire weight of the sustained narrative. The Wednesday Comics single page format forces the artist to create a story unit which may well be part of a larger storyline, however it still must be able to stand alone.

This depiction of Paul M'uad Dib and the Fremen Stilgar is based on paintings John Schoenherr did for an illustrated edition of Dune published by Berkley Books in 1977. Frank Herbert said that of all the visual depictions of his ideas, Schoenherr's work was closest to the way Dune's people and things looked in his own mind. The colors here are by Lovern Kindzierski, who worked with me on the second half of the Strange Adventures strip.

GPS + camera + compass = Augmented Reality Browser

View the real world... now with tags, labels, and ratings



Blew my mind a wee bit when I tried it out on my phone. Gave me names of businesses, venues, etc right on the building itself whenever I panned over something with the camera, with clickable links to reviews, ratings, etc. Also searchable and filterable tags. Coming to iPhone soonish.

Remember back in the day when Gmail first arrived?

Everybody was scrambling for Gmail beta invite; people were even selling them on ebay. This was all due to Google bringing an all new and near revolutionary perspective to how people use email. The simple change from deleting to archiving and the no-brainer threading of email conversations changed the emailing landscape in the most significant way since "You've got mail" decades earlier. At the time, it was even difficult to explain to somebody who had yet to use Gmail how it was better since the change seemed so simple, but once they did, they couldn't imagine ever going back.

It looks like Google may have done it again with Google Voice. Google Voice may change the way people make phone calls, text, and get voicemail. I'll try to explain why, but like Gmail, until you experience it, you don't really get the full impact.

In short, imagine if YOU rather than YOUR PHONE had a phone number; like how you rather than your computer have an email address. Imagine if all calls, texts, and voice mails were receivable, accessible, and manageable by you using the same phone number regardless of access point: work phone, cell phone, home phone, and even internet browser. Imagine copying, deleting, or emailing off your voicemails in a visual interface similar to email. Imagine if you could manage which of your phones rang at which times of day or according to identity of caller. Imagine if those calls and messages were digital data streams on your cellular that used a data plan and zero minutes.

Porting your existing phone number to GV and integration of GV into Gmail are coming soon. The service is still in beta and requires an invite code.

Self-referential

re: Chris' Hello Kitty Post...

Brokeback to the Future

Neat.

I know nothing about this film and the Harry Knowles quote makes me nervous, but...

The trailer intrigues:

As some of you may know, I fear technology.

But this is still a cool demo of where the future might be leading us...

Morph Concept Phone:

George Michael's Continuing Contributions to the Hard Rock Community

Not sure if this is getting airplay in Austin but it's getting pretty big out here on the left coast. Actually, what am I talking about? 101x will probably destroy it's entire catalog and only play this song for the rest of eternity - as they previously tried to do with Alice in Chains' "Rooster."

This is a cover of Wham's "Careless Whisper" by Seether. Listen and then pass judgment. I, uh...really like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7imqO-OBVk

OMG, nostalgia overload

A guy made a ton of recordings of the ambient sounds of video game arcades from 1984-1988. Dare to revisit the heyday of the arcade, with its awesomely tinny sounds and beggar children trying to tell you how to get past certain levels...

INSERT COIN

New TERMINATOR: SALVATION trailer

I'm kinda digging the Road Warrior aesthetic. Definitely a reinvention of the franchise.

A Truly Noble Use of Time Travel Technology

From Demetri Martin's new sketch/comedy show, "Important Things," which premiered on Wednesday and was in fact pretty funny, kind of a cross between Chappelle (if he were, y'know, white and in his twenties), The Ben Stiller Show and The Daily Show.

But honestly, the sketch is funnier in its entirety than in this short clip, and mostly I wanted to get that atrocity that D3 had subjected us to off the top of the blog. ;)

That thing is gonna haunt my damn dreams.

Full TERMINATOR: SALVATION trailer

Seems hit and miss, but there're possibilities:

Trailer here. The motorcycle Terminators actually look kind of cool.

An alternative to playing in the 40k RPG?

Biff Sings

Seems the actor who played Biff in Back to the Future does stand-up from time to time. Here's his musical response to fan questions about the movie...