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A long-overdue linkdump.

by Aaron Williams on January 24, 2020 at 2:06 AM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming, You call that noise "music?"

Because the song is a bit tarnished from Fallout 76, I vote that “Country Roads” be featured in the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077:

If the game bombs, we might have to consider the idea that John Denver has cursed his own music and haunting all projects that license it.

Moving on:

• Firstly, rest in peace to Monty Python alum, Sir Terry Jones. Apart from his work in one of the most famous comedy groups in the world, I’ll always remember him for his very enjoyable BBC series, Medieval Lives and Crusades. The “living paintings” in that latter one really stuck with me.

• From the Lovecraft story, “From Beyond,” here’s one propmaker’s version of the Tillinghast Device. It’s perfect for your next cult rave.

• And turning to actual issues of mental health, here’s an interesting look at a notebook from an asylum inmate in the 1930’s and the odd journey they took.

• Here’s some truly loaded dice for your next D&D session: They’ve got sapphires and a $300 price tag, so even if you roll a 1, you can claim it’s only the finest quality critical failure.

• Speaking of special-interest items of rare quality, if there’s a zombie in your life that turns up where its nose used to be at pedestrian gray matter, perhaps it would prefer to dine on a hunk of human brain that survived for 2600 years. That’s some well-aged nosh, there.

• Turning to the theater, start coming up with joke names for songs and see which ones actually show up in the upcoming Karate Kid musical. I can’t wait to see the “wax on, wax off” choreography along with a chorus line of people sweeping the leg.

• And our ending game is a bit like the one available on Steam called “Hidden Folks.” This one is Heartreasure, and your goal is to click on hearts to unlock new areas. Sometimes the unlock for one place is in another, so if you can’t find the trigger, move on to a different zone. Also, it helps to be able to tell where notes are on a treble scale.

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Do you own the original Skyrim? Need a time sink?

by Aaron Williams on December 23, 2019 at 7:12 PM
Posted In: Stuff with magic and swords, Video Gaming

You need to go get Enderal. I gave this a spin mostly out of spite, as I’ve had the original edition of Skyrim in my Steam library since it launched. I wanted to get the DLC for the game the same way I’d gotten it for Fallout 3: Wait for it to go on sale, get it cheap, then either play it or play the mods that used the new assets.

It never got down to the low prices of F3’s content, and soon after it should have, the special edition of Skyrim came out and all things involving the older version never went on sale and couldn’t be found via Steam’s search function.

Anyway, one of Steam’s new features is suggesting games based on ones you’ve played, and it suggested this free game called Enderal. It’s basically a total conversion mod for the original Elder Scrolls V game, no DLC required. If you only have the special edition, you might be able to get Enderal working, but the instructions are kind of extensive. Since I had the “antique” edition, I downloaded the game just to give my old version of Skyrim a way to thumb its nose at its younger, sexier replacement.

I took it for a spin for a few hours, and I haven’t seen anything that was in the trailer, except for one of the ninja-mask looking dudes, making me wonder just how huge this thing might be. So far it feels pretty massive, and it’s also pretty brutal if you’re used to other Bethesda-style games. I’d leveled up quite a bit, going for a lot of powers involving magical fire and electricity, and I’d still get murdered if more than two wolves came at me at once. Exploration is rewarding, but it’s also something you don’t do lightly. In this game, magic causes something called “Arcane Fever,” which will eventually turn you into a monster if you let it get too bad. It’s a bummer, therefore, that all the healing potions I came across caused my fever to increase.

The plot is intriguing thus far, and the perk tree seems to have something to do with all this talk of alternate realities, which is a pretty neat reason for how you can pick up powers out of thin air. You also learn skills via books, and there are books for every skill. It does seem a little strange that some of them are for skills you probably wouldn’t want others to have, but then again I found a merchant selling magic items that enhance werewolf powers, so maybe they’re a lot more fatalistic.

The mechanics from Skyrim are still present, so it’s not totally alien. Alchemy still works the same with you having to taste everything once in order to figure out its initial use. The combat AI isn’t the greatest, but I’m not complaining. If it wasn’t for bad pathfinding and enemies getting stuck on the terrain in places, I would’ve died even more. The magic skills seem beefier, and I went with them largely because your starting weapons aren’t very impressive. I suppose if I’d chosen the memories/skills that helped with archery or swordplay, that would’ve helped. Still, I found the electrical spells very satisfying, though keeping one’s mana high enough last multiple enemies is still a distant dream and why I kept a number of melee weapons in my inventory.

There are quite a few cutscenes in this game, especially early on. I should also say that not all the voice actors are pros; I suspect a lot of volunteer work was involved, but most of the ones I heard did a decent job. That said, some dialog exchanges can be pretty long, but you can discover quests, make friendships or strengthen relationships with NPCs, and can gain “knowledge points” that earn you XP as well as stat boosts, eventually. I guess what I’m pointing out is that this game is pretty story-rich, so don’t go in expecting that all you’ll need is a quest marker and more hit points than whoever it’s pointing you to.

So if you’ve got the setup, I recommend getting Enderal from Steam and trying it out. All you could possibly lose is all of your free time for the foreseeable future, so why not? 🙂

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Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut Digital Classic Edition is FREE from Good Old Games for a limited time.

by Aaron Williams on December 11, 2019 at 12:42 PM
Posted In: It's got Robots and Lasers, Video Gaming

And by “a limited time,” they mean just under two days as of this post. Here’s their store page for Wasteland 2, and I give it a recommend if you like party-based computer role-playing games. It’s got more polished in-game animation than the original Fallout games, but the “cutscenes” are a little slide-showy. It’s got some decisions for you to make, plot twists involving various party members, and a showdown at the end that can be made easier or more difficult depending on the actions you took getting there.

It’s worth playing, especially for free. I’m guessing it’s to generate buzz for the upcoming Wasteland 3, whose release date is “early 2020”:

I think the in-game lore is just that at some point, a military facility (pre- or post-war) decided that robotic arachnids was the key to ruling the battlefield and put them into mass production (even spilling over into Fallout New Vegas’ DLC, Old World Blues).

I may also have to add that trailer’s version of “Land of Confusion” to my playlist. If you want to hear it without all the explosions and narration, here it is.

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Ghostbusters Afterlife

by Aaron Williams on December 9, 2019 at 11:52 AM
Posted In: Cineplexia, From the Mouth of Madness, Nostalgia!

This trailer just dropped, and it intrigues me on several levels:

For starters, this is a proper sequel to the original Ghostbusters movies, and it’s kind of what I’d hoped the premise of the 2016 film was going to be: In-universe acknowledgement that previous events in New York had happened, ghosts are real, etc. As for what’s going on in the film itself, I have some theories:

I believe we see a revamped Slimer (or a close relative) being Proton Pack’d and what appears to be the foreleg from one of Zuul’s temple dogs…

…which tells me the ghosts and other entities from the first movie(s?) are still around. The mention of fracking, earthquakes, and the mineshaft makes me think that Egon Spengler used some kind of underground setup to store all the ghosts from the first two movies, and that storage arrangement is failing. Perhaps this is a commentary on environmental impacts of waste from fracking or nuclear power?

The film wisely sounds like it’s staying lighthearted while not going for the SNL comedy of the previous movies, which is fine with me. While I liked the humor as a kid, I was also fascinated with the technology and lore. If this movie finally spawns some kind of “expanded universe,” I’d love it if they went the route of the many Ghostbusters fan clubs where any future movies (or even TV shows) would feature branch offices in different locales. I find the Iowa Black Squadron 13 Ghostbusters especially intriguing just based on the name alone.

And I know the 2016 film comes in for a lot of criticism, but I want to mention what bugged me the most about any movie in the entire franchise. It was this:

I know it was the second film, but I couldn’t come up with a satisfying in-universe reason for this logo being in the actual movie. The only one that even remotely makes sense is that Peter Venkman is a Deadpool-like consciousness, fully aware that he’s really an actor playing a part in a movie sequel. Him working a “2” into their company mascot is him breaking the 4th wall for his own amusement.

My secondary complaint is how ABC re-recorded a lot of Lorenzo Music’s voice work as Peter Venkman in the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters with Dave Coulier in reruns of seasons one and two. Still, the show had Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski as the series’ story editor and he wrote several episodes. For his sake, I’ll forgive them a little for sticking a Full House alum in my Ghostbusters cartoon.

I seem to have really gone off-point here, so as usual, I’m hopeful but cautious. If this is good, then the next letter-writing campaign probably shouldn’t focus on the next sequel per se: It should be to tell the suits at Sony to not muck about with it like they have with so many other films they’ve meddled to death.

And hey, if they decide to go the TV route, Supernatural is coming to a close, and a ghost-themed series with proton packs might be a good replacement, right? 🙂

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Does this mean I like Muzak?

by Aaron Williams on December 7, 2019 at 2:08 PM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, You call that noise "music?"

Me as a kid in a mall: “Ugh, they just had someone record an instrumental version of a cool pop song so they could pipe it out over the shoppers who might get over-excited if they heard the original.”

The internet: “Do you like Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky?'”

This makes me wonder if those old “lounge music” versions of songs we once heard in our nation’s elevators would be considered novel if they’d been presented ironically?

Anyway, if you enjoyed this balalaika-based tribute, the Клюква Шоу channel has even more for your listening pleasure.

2 Comments

Post-Turkey Day Linkdump

by Aaron Williams on December 1, 2019 at 11:43 AM
Posted In: Articus Pharticus, Cineplexia, It Came from the Internet, It's got Robots and Lasers, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming, Video Gaming

It was “turkey day” this week, so naturally I tuned into the Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel on Twitch that’s now showing most of the episodes 24/7, minus those they can’t get the rebroadcast rights to (like the various Godzilla movies). It reminded me of one of my favorite comedy bits from the host segments, and since I now have this song running through my head, I have to inflict it on everyone else. From their send-up of The Starfighters, here’s the United Servo Academy Men’s Chorus singing their Academy’s hymn:

If you go looking for the lyrics to that last bit where Tom launches into “Hinky-Dinky Parlez-Vous,” be warned that there are multiple versions that seem to be the result of a competition to be the most risque.

Now that we’re all MSTie eyed (see what I did there?), here’s some other items I ran across:

• Remember the Numa Numa guy? He’s become an electronica musician and has a posted YouTube playlist of the tracks from his album, Haunted House of Pancakes.

• Some may call this a more resilient way of archiving data, others (like me) see it as one step closer to having holo-crystals, but Microsoft has successfully archived the first Superman movie on a piece of glass. This kind of makes the whole “Phantom Zone” scene kind of meta, now that I think about it.

• “Marbling.” No, it’s not about meat or how Martha Stewart applies paint to make Christmas baubles look like they’re made of marble. It’s a cool technique for making those psychedelic end pages for books you may have run across in your local castle library.

• Speaking of books, here’s a blog of the sorts of novels I recall devouring back before all this “lit-RPG” stuff came along: Let’s Read TSR covers any book penned about Dragonlance, The Forgotten Realms, and all those other campaign settings everyone always wants to have revived when a new edition of D&D comes out.

• From the “things I never knew about a given celebrity” files comes news that Sir Rod Stewart is really into model trains. I love the idea that he’d request hotel space to work on some of the buildings while on tour.

• Do you know how fast your star was going? A star has been ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at about 1,700 km per second. Hopefully this departure was amicable and it won’t be returning as some kind of vengeful sapient star-monster or anything.

• Another departure that has returned (for now) is Star Trek IV, which I hope will have more sci-fi and no references to a previous Star Trek IV, though the theme music to that film was good enough that I wouldn’t begrudge the composer a few referential stings in the soundtrack.

• An artist has created the Elder Gods’ gaming dice, I think. I mean, it sure looks like you could use them to roll a square root of -1.

• This is an older item from February of this year, but I didn’t know that Canada had a hair-freezing contest. Since the colder months are upon us, I thought it’d be a good time to inspire any would-be competitors to start training for the 2020 competition.

• Our game o’ the moment is Ghostly Tricks. It’s a puzzle game where you have to use your ability to have your ghost leave your body to solve puzzles. There’s also a life-force mechanic, so keep in mind you don’t always have to use *your* life-force to get things done…

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The Mandalorian, if nothing else, carries on several Star Wars traditions.

by Aaron Williams on November 13, 2019 at 10:30 PM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, It's got Robots and Lasers, The Idiot Box

Here’s a fairly spoiler-free look at episode one (not to be confused with Episode I), but I’ll the meat of it behind a jump cut:

LucasDisney’s new series, The Mandalorian, just made its debut on Disney’s new streaming service. Overall, it was a good opening episode and very easy to dive into. There was a flashback sequence for the main character that was a little heavy-handed, but other than that, I thought it worked well to set the stage. It reminds me most of the Dark Horse Star Wars comic books, as if this was a vignette that could be part of a bigger story but works fine on its own. I did catch a few glimpses of the actor playing the titular role looking a bit like he couldn’t see well with his helmet on, especially when he had to run or do other action-y stuff. I can only guess that they didn’t use the technique I’ve seen in other media, where visors and other reflective parts of headgear are added via CGI later, allowing the actors to have a larger field of vision. It’ll either work itself out in time, or it’ll make for an amusing “fail” compilation.

Is it good? It looks that way thus far, but I don’t know if we’re in for a more complicated plot or if they’re going to have the episodes be more stand-alone-ish. Either is possible, since it’d be easy to have a “bounty of the week” setup driving the plots, and it’s Star Wars, so things being more epic in scope is kind of par for the course.

Hit the jump for some more detailed and random observations.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Jurassic Industrial Park

by Aaron Williams on November 8, 2019 at 6:35 PM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, Science ahoy!, The Idiot Box, Writing

I recently ran across a PDF of a scientific thought experiment called The Silurian Hypothesis.

The quick summary is: Given how fragile civilization’s products are over millions of years, it’s possible that if a civilization existed at the time of the dinosaurs, we might not notice it. There are several mass extinction events that are kind of similar to the ones we’re experiencing now, and the thought is that if there was supporting evidence, one might try figuring out how to look for signs that a large civilization of some kind is what wiped out so many species.

Note: This is not to say this actually happened, it’s just that it’s possible within the boundaries of what we know, which makes it a neat concept for science fiction. It’s kind of like how the math works for some forms of warp drive, meaning it could work, but the current energy required is the equivalent of Jupiter’s mass.

Anyway, the concept of dino-beings isn’t entirely new (as the image from Doctor Who shows), and could arguably be the premise for the old sit-com, Dinosaurs, which managed to have one of the most downer endings in comedy TV history. The thing that stuck out after being reminded of the hypothesis is that I can’t think of many instances where it was explored in harder science fiction, apart from at least one case:

Stephen Baxter’s novel, Evolution touches on the idea, having species of dinosaurs that aren’t in the fossil record. This is within the realm of possibility, as it’s estimated that we still have 76% of all non-bird dinosaurs to discover, and we’ll probably never find all of them due to degradation over time as well as some dinosaurs not having given us the courtesy of being fossilized. Baxter’s novel even has sapient, tool-using dinosaurs, but the reason this kind of thing is difficult to find is their tools (sharpened stones, rudimentary textiles) are hard to preserve over thousands of years, never mind millions.

All that was just to point out that this makes for some neat fodder for any sci-fi writers out there to take another crack at. Imagine if a future probe or telescope found a really old dino-ship out past Pluto? Or go even further and have a dino-scientist pull something like the movie Frequency and start trading radio signals with a human’s CB setup in the present day? Sure, the language barrier might be hard to overcome, but you can imagine you’ve got really smart dinosaurs. 🙂

By the way, this concept is not meant to make the “Distant Origin” episode of Voyager any less terrible. It was a cynical attempt to get ratings thanks to a Jurassic Park movie coming out at the same time, which I say should be a violation of the Prime Directive… somehow.

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An overdue linkdump, starting with… tap dancing.

by Aaron Williams on October 30, 2019 at 12:28 AM
Posted In: Cineplexia, It's got Robots and Lasers, Mystery Clip Theater, Science ahoy!, Tabletop Gaming, Video Gaming, You call that noise "music?"

It used to be that almost every musical movie had a tap dance number, so why not have one in tribute to video games? “Postmodern Jukebox” performs music from Super Mario Bros. while the talented tapper Demi Remick adds to both the rhythm and (kind of) the melody:

What else do we have, you ask?

• An odd tale of how the world’s first floating hotel wound up a wreck in North Korea.

• I have no idea how this would work for game night, but someone created the United States using Settlers of Catan tiles.

• Don’t ask how I came across this Quora question, but I figured it would be of interest: Are centaurs insects?

• Turning to the post-apocalypse, there’s work being done on an open-source OS designed to work with the technology you’d likely scrounge from the ruins of civilization. I don’t know if this will help if the wasteland is run like Bethesda’s Fallout First scheme, but you never know.

• Speaking of Fallout, here’s a decently-recent list of RPG Codex’s 101 best PC RPG’s. Outer Worlds isn’t on the list yet, and I’m waiting for it to come to Steam in the hopes it’ll be slightly cheaper, bug-free, and bundled with all of its DLC by then.

• Oh, and back to the apocalypse for a pro-tip: After the bombs drop, don’t use hair conditioner. It could attract radioactive fallout… which might solve the whole “hair” issue by itself, now that I think about it.

• Halloween is coming up and most of the internet likes cat pictures, so let’s combine them in a Tumblr blog of Cat Cosplay. Those are far more patient cats than I’ve ever encountered.

• News of Matrix 4 being made wasn’t exactly getting my “there is no spoon” vibe going, but the addition of Neil Patrick Harris is intriguing.

• And let’s close with a puzzle game: Compopo. Use an increasingly complicated series of controls to try and light all the stars.

3 Comments

Last week, I “ramped” things up! Ha-haaaa… sorry.

by Aaron Williams on September 27, 2019 at 2:07 AM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, Gaming, The Basement Storage Bin

My son’s school recently had a carnival, and I thought having a simple game where toy race cars could go down a ramp and land on some kind of target would be a cool ticket-winnin’ activity. After hunting around online, I even found that one could get loads of cheap off-brand toy cars for very little money, so the plan was to have a game where the kids could not only get tickets for the prize table, but win a toy car, too! This is how it started, with a big piece of wood and some leftover Plexiglas (which is very hard to see in that photo, but trust me, it’s there).

Getting a first step and building around it is usually how I put things together, so I bent the plexi into a curve and had my kid trace the resulting shape on the wood. I added a flat launching area to the top of the ramp-shape, and I got out the ol’ jigsaw.

Two jigsaw blades later (they were kind of old to begin with), I had one ramp shape. I traced it on the remaining wood and I now had the sides of my ramp. I primed both sides and painted them white, because that’s the color of paint I had in the workshop:

I then measured the Plexiglas for width and cut a bunch of braces to hold the sides together and keep them stable:

Putting it all together, it looks like I knew what I was doing, doesn’t it?

I painted the interiors at each end black, planning on having curtains or other obstructions to keep anyone from seeing the unfinished middle bits. Confident that it would take more than the usual amount of misfortune to break this wooden construct, I drilled holes in the Plexiglas and set to putting it on the ramp with screws. Then this happened:

There always has to be a second-act setback, doesn’t there? This is where I found out how expensive clear plastic stuff is, so replacing it became a bit of a financial conundrum. Thankfully, I found a different material: Corrugated plastic sheets. Imagine cardboard, but it’s made out of plastic, complete with that wavy stuff between the two smooth sides. It’s easy to work with, easy to cut, and it doesn’t crack in two when some idiot decides to build something by the seat of his pants. I added some light braces to support it, attached it to my ramp and it came out looking pretty good:

I just trimmed up the part where the kiddos would launch their cars and folded the excess at the end down, and it was more or less done! I did find out that my local auto parts store no longer sold obnoxious flame decals (you have to special order them), so I found some “holographic” duct tape and added a racing stripe. I also took some plastic endcap material and ran it down the sides as guardrails, in case someone’s vehicle got a little out of control. And here’s how it looked when we took it to Josh’s school:

You might think that was the end of the dramatics, but there was more. The cheapo toy cars I’d ordered were appealing enough to look at, but they couldn’t race worth a darn. They were too light and often didn’t roll straight, so they’d sort of slide down the ramp and come to rest at the bottom of the curve in a rather sad testament to “you get what you pay for.” I ran to the nearest drug store and bought five Hot Wheels cars that had “Great For Track” on their backing cards, and these were used to actually make jumps, while the lesser vehicles were given out as prizes if you landed your car in the central magenta basket.

That was the end of the dramatics. It was quite a popular activity, and I saw lots of 1st and 2nd graders walking away with prizes, so it fit the needed skill level as well. All in all, it worked out great, and now I need to figure out what I can build for next year. I’m hoping I can do something with pool noodles that get used as javelins… 🙂

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