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A few D&D-related things you might find interesting.

by Aaron Williams on April 16, 2018 at 10:40 AM
Posted In: Nostalgia!, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming

• Coleco put out a series of Big Wheels Power Cycles in the 80’s, one of which was Dungeons & Dragons themed! I now have a new first item on my “What to do if I get a time machine” list. Some trivia: The characters pictured behind the cycle in this post’s image appeared in the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, including the one in the front. He’s a paladin named “Strongheart,” and in addition to having his own action figure and appearance in a D&D video game from CAPCOM, he was in the 8th episode of the cartoon’s first season, “Servant of Evil.”.

• If you’re like me (and I know I am), you probably never ran across a rare bit of D&D gaming gear called the Fighting Wheel Gaming Aid. It’s a circular device made of three plastic wheels that let you quickly determine combat stats for “Fighters, Rangers, Paladins & Bards.” Supposedly, wheels for other classes were going to be developed, but due to low sales, they were scrapped.

• Back when the FBI was investigating the Unabomber case, they thought it’d be a good idea investigate a group of D&D players. Apparently, one of them had made some statements to the FBI in another investigation, and that set off this bit of tabletop gaming history.

• And if you’re into electronical DIY projects, here’s how to make your own digital d20, complete with graphics for critical hits and fails.

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Assorted things you might find of interest…

by Aaron Williams on April 6, 2018 at 3:00 AM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater, Stuff with magic and swords, Tabletop Gaming

To start with, here’s a new-ish YouTube channel I ran across recently called “Puffin Forest.” It’s a collection of humorous animated tales from one man’s journey through many a tabletop world. Here’s a sample:

If you like his style, the rest of his channel is a fun watch. For the younger ears in the audience, an occasional swear is loosed, but not very often.

What else can you fill your time with? Well…

• MST3K and RiffTrax veteran Mike Nelson and RiffTrax producer Conor Lastowka have a podcast called “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back.” Click here and scroll down for the first episode, and then strap in for 2 seasons of wondering why Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was so critically lauded while Armada wasn’t.

• In case you missed it, there’s been a rise in self-proclaimed time travelers. Apparently, our era is in dire need of correction, but hey, we’ll get time machines eventually!

• As I’m related to a librarian, I’m morally obligated to post this Twitter thread about mysterious marks appearing in one library’s books.

• It’s been confirmed that T-Rexes are vulnerable to fire, and their bones were actually made of steel. Either that or Skynet sent a sleeper Terminator back in time (more time travelers!) that met with an unfortunate accident.

• And here’s a flash game that has an art style that captured my interest and will probably waste too much of your time. It’s called Halla, and it’s a kind-of-card game where you try to out-summon your opponent’s army of Viking warriors and monsters with one of your own. Every few seconds you’re presented with three cards, giving either a magic effect for everyone on the battlefield or adding a new line of troops for your attacking forces. Win spoils from battle and buy new cards for new kinds of creatures. Some tips: The larger, wizard-looking “ranged” guys can shoot down any flying opponents, so get them when you can. Summoning loads of quick-deploying small units can overwhelm your enemy, but it also depletes your souls more quickly for that round. If you buy a banner, you have to click on it to activate it, or you won’t get its effects. While the battle is happening, click a lot on the viking face in the center of the screen, as that drops extra spoils for purchasing stuff. Lastly, unless it’s been fixed, a card showing a single warrior with a weapon raised doesn’t actually summon anything, so if you draw that one, it’s probably best to pick something else.

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Getting some books back in print soon.

by Aaron Williams on April 3, 2018 at 3:52 PM
Posted In: Articus Pharticus, From the Mouth of Madness

I took my eyes off of Lightning Press’ offerings for a while and when I finally looked up what they had available, I was delighted to see they now offer a standard graphic novel size setup! I’ve been converting the first ps238 trade into what will hopefully be a format acceptable to their systems, and if all goes well, all my other books will soon be demandably printable, starting at DriveThruComics.

As a side note, their per-unit cost is comparable with what I was paying to have my books printed by the thousands and then having to store the things, so this is a pretty neato development. Further, they do color printing, so more recent comics as well as ones that haven’t seen print outside of black-and-white should soon be available as well. I’m thinking a big Full Frontal Nerdity compendium would be nice, though that would probably need to be in a larger format. Call it a coffee table gaming table book, I suppose.

So bear with me while I wrangle InDesign into formatting everything properly while I cringe at what my art used to look like. Shudder.

And of course, each book will now contain thank-you’s to and lists of the fine Patreon patrons whose patronage has helped keep me afloat. You’re all wonderful and I’m glad to have you aboard!

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F1 2015 is free for a limited time!

by Aaron Williams on March 23, 2018 at 2:02 AM
Posted In: Video Gaming

For another day or so, F1 2015 is free at HumbleBundle!

I know nothing about this game, but free is free, though Gamespot said it was a bit “Jekyll & Hyde”:

And for those who want them, there are mods.

So if racing Formula-1 cars circa 2015 and not paying for it (legally) is your thing, or you like having a Steam library you can impress people with by dismissively saying “I just don’t have the time to even play all of these,” enjoy!

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We’ll start off this linkdump with a little mechanical horror…

by Aaron Williams on March 22, 2018 at 2:29 PM
Posted In: Cineplexia, It Came from the Internet, Nostalgia!, Science ahoy!, This junk again?, Video Gaming

• There’s a YouTube channel from someone dedicated to restoring and displaying the robotic mascots from the defunct Showbiz Pizza Place restaurants. As these characters are what the monsters from the 5 Nights at Freddy’s video game franchise are based on, it’s no wonder that seeing Billy Bob without his fur on is just about as scary as a supernaturally possessed Freddy Fazbear.

• If animal deaths in films are upsetting enough that you’d want to avoid them altogether, there’s a site called Does the Dog Die? which lets you know ahead of time about any canine mortality, jumpscares, clowns, or just about anything else that might be of concern.

• Japan is trying out a “super monster wolf” device to scare wild boars away from farms. As I understand it, boars are fiendishly clever, so they might want to mix things up and get Boston Dynamics to make a real super monster wolf robot that can move, chase things, and totally not go wrong in a way that would make for good October film release.

• Speaking of horror films, Stephen Spielberg is starting filming on Indiana Jones 5 next year. Shia LaBeouf will be LaNotAppearing, so there’s that. I’m trying to think of what sort of movie they can make that wouldn’t be better than returning to the WWII era and making Harrison Ford out of CGI.

• In 2028, the European Space Agency will launch a probe built to spectrographically analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, so we know which worlds our colonists can possibly survive on if they can fend off the xenomorphs.

• ArsTechnica has an article and video about a raytracing demo in the Unreal Engine. They use Star Wars character Captain Phasma to demonstrate how a scene can be reflected in the surfaces of this video game engine, meaning that future games could look even snazzier than ever. Now if they could only make the plots for certain role-playing games *cough* Fallout 4 *cough* as impressive…

• Even if you have no interest in making a synthetic diamond, this “Instructables” on how to make a synthetic diamond is a fun read. I’m pretty sure my microwave would burn out long before the maximum possible timer setting, so I’ve opted to let others try it and report their results.

• But gems are only one possible treasure in role-playing games (how was that for a clumsy segue?). Magical items are highly prized, but they can get a bit same-y. To prevent this in your game, might I suggest using Rusty & Co.’s Magic Item Generator?

• Rotten Tomatoes has used its aggregation ratings (for good or ill) to bring you this ranking of video game movies from worst to best. I wonder where the old Saturday Supercade cartoons would fall on that list?

• It takes a while to get challenging, but Colorzzle is a good time-waster puzzle game where you have to mix colors by placing tiles, aiming lasers, and switching color wheels.

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Stephen Hawking has passed at age 72.

by Aaron Williams on March 14, 2018 at 1:51 PM
Posted In: Mystery Clip Theater, Science ahoy!

I’m not well-versed enough in the various sciences Mr. Hawking was prominently known for, so the best tributes I can come up with are the following two videos. First, Stephen Hawking sings Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”:

And in addition to adding his synthesized voice to a Pink Floyd song, he was sampled in one of my favorite “make music out of people saying stuff” videos, “A Glorious Dawn” by Melodysheep:

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Where I suggest JB Weld make a new product…

by Aaron Williams on March 12, 2018 at 2:19 AM
Posted In: Articus Pharticus

There’s a great Japanese art form called Kintsugi, where broken ceramic items are repaired by using a lacquer dusted with gold. Some very attractive images of the technique can be seen at this BBC webpage. Now, Randy Newman once said about adapting the literary work of Doctor Faustus into a musical something to the effect of “I’m an American, so naturally I had to ruin it.” I’m probably proposing something similar here.

Two days ago, I knocked a coffee mug off of a kitchen counter. My wife made it with pictures of our son from when he was an infant, and while it’s served us well for years, the handle didn’t survive a trip to the floor. I looked at the adhesives I had on hand and googled their names along with how effective they’d be at holding mug bits together. The winner was JB Weld, so I did my best to reassemble the shattered material, and this was the result:

It really does work. The repair has survived both the microwave and the dishwasher. Now, note that it’s not on the part of the mug that drinks will come in contact with. The very, very unofficial word from glue-mancers is that once it’s fully cured (about 7 days), it should be safe, but food grade epoxies exist, so… Maybe we should stick with handles for now.

Anyway, as this is the only adhesive I’ve had this amount of luck with when under such harsh conditions, I think we need JB Kintsugi. It would be a gold-tinted version of their glue designed to fix engine blocks. We’d get the appearance of hard work involving precious metals when it’s really squeezed from a couple of tubes and held together with clear tape until it sets. Yes, it’s turning a fine art into something requiring less effort than a paint-by-numbers kit with only two colors, but with arts funding being what it is these days, it may be the only way some of us will ever try it out, right?

Plus, you can then actually weld other things to your mugs, if that’s your thing.

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Three from the SCP Foundation, Fallout stuff, but first…

by Aaron Williams on March 1, 2018 at 12:58 AM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater, The Internetonomicon, Video Gaming

It’s been a long while since I posted a cat video, and this one tickled me, so here it is:

Lightswitch Cat is stealin’ ur photons.

• The often creepy SCP Foundation has a few new entries I thought would be of interest to those gathered here. First, we have SCP-3116, a euclid-class object that is dedicated to the popularity of a certain cat-based newspaper comic strip empire.

• Then we have (with a warning about one f-bomb and apologies to Wil Wheaton) SCP-3135, which shows you really should never be the biggest Star Trek fan if you want to avoid… whatever happened to the last one.

• And finally, one of the J-class or “joke” SCP’s. This one is amusing because someone fed over 3,000 SCP articles into a predictive text application and it spat out SCP-\̅\̅\̅\̅-J, an SCP made out of algorithmic creepypasta. The robots are even taking over our amusements in horror fiction, which is disturbing in a meta kind of way.

• Speaking of disturbing things, we turn to (fictional) nuclear post-apocalypse with news about how the Capital Wasteland project is coming along. Some intrepid modders are working hard to put Fallout 3 in the Fallout 4 engine.

• On another Fallout-related topic, Project Brazil, a kind of NCR-based prequel to Fallout New Vegas is “done” and in the bug-hunting phase of being refined before release.

• Players of online video games might take notice of the ongoing attempts to allow dead game servers to be revived for historical reasons.

• And we have a Unity-based game for fans of the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Hand. You play Ash Williams’ severed hand from Evil Dead II, trying to get its fingers around his throat. Naturally, as the hero, he’s not going to make it easy for you…

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A smattering of sci-fi news, but first, musical swordfighting…

by Aaron Williams on February 23, 2018 at 3:51 PM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater, Nostalgia!, Paper with words on

How have I never seen this glorious duel before?

Now I want to have someone re-enact the various duels from throughout the movies like that. Get on it, internet!

Onto other productions which may or may not be more entertaining. Amazon has purchased the rights to the late master science fiction writer Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas, the first novel in his Culture series. This is exciting not just because Banks was a great author, but it’s an ambitious undertaking. This is space opera writ pretty darn large, with lots of high concept races, characters, and civilizations. The Culture is often branded as “communist” by glib critics, but that’s really not taking into account it’s a post-scarcity society that has a collective democracy allowing its citizens (augmented humans, sapient machines, just about anything that thinks therefore it is, etc.) to do whatever they want and live however (and often as whatever) they wish. The protagonists are from the Culture’s organizations that deal with threats to the Culture or to other civilizations.

I’m just sayin’ that’s going to take a lot of CGI.

Then we have a trailer trailer for a Netflix reboot of Lost in Space. I suppose with exoplanets being a more prevalent idea in popular culture, a ship with an FTL drive and no way to navigate back to Earth could work. I’m not sure why you’d send five people (and perhaps one stowaway?) as a colony starter, but maybe they’re bringing along a lot of embryonic colonists or something.

Finally, we have a rather confusing reboot of the old computer-generated TV series, Reboot. If you were hoping for an updated version of the original series, I’m afraid what you’ll get is a mixture of CG and live-action with a lot of inspiration from the Iron Man movies. The upvote-downvote counter on this one says a lot, since the trailer is pretty awful. It says something I’m more impressed at the realistically dirty keyboard seen in the opening sequence than I am at the “let me video blog the premise” thing that follows. I probably won’t watch this, which means it’ll go on for ten seasons and my kid will be a fan. 🙂

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Ice storm blog post

by Aaron Williams on February 20, 2018 at 12:17 PM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Nostalgia!, Om Nom Nom!, Science ahoy!, The Internetonomicon

We had “thunder ice” today in KC, in that an ice storm that closed schools and canceled flights was accompanied by thunder. I was surprised to find out that “Thunder Ice” is the name of a hockey arena in Angola, Indiana, but not a flavor of Mountain Dew, most likely the color of Smurf-derived windshield wiper fluid. Go figure.

• As a lover of all things spicy, I wouldn’t mind signing the waiver for a dish of this Scottish ice cream made with Carolina Reaper peppers.

• Two fans of the Super Mario Bros. movie have been on an 11-year mission to archive and glorify the film. I only vaguely remember the trailer and that it starred Bob Hoskins, the actor who played Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I also see on his IMDB page that his character in Super Mario Bros. is listed as “Mario Mario.” That could lead to one of those gags that goes, “Who are you, and how did you get in through the pipes?” “I’m Mario. And I’m Mario.”

• If you’re jealous of those who go on cruises, enjoy some schadenfreude at one Carnival cruise ship that “descended into violent anarchy.” Had I been a passenger, I think I would’ve asked for more than a 25% off coupon for another cruise.

• A mysterious and sudden treefall occurred near Washington’s Lake Quinailt that some were speculating was a smaller version of the Tunguska Blast. A weather science guy looks at the evidence and gives us their run down on how it probably happened.

• When Skynet’s robot drones finally come for us, they may catch us unawares due to being disguised as donuts.

• Lastly, a flash game time-waster, Knife Hit. Try to throw your knives at a spinning log without striking another knife. Hit apples for bonus points and watch out for increasingly erratic spinning on the part of your target.

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