Fans of alternate history and very bad accents rejoice, for I have started a podcast called Vorpal History! It’s over on The Fantasy Network, which is home to loads of other great productions. They interviewed me about the project, and you can read all about it over here!
It’s letting me stretch that ol’ worldbuilding muscle, and I hope everyone enjoys it. I’m also learning far more about how Adobe Audition works than I ever thought I would, so I’m also growing as a person, right?
In-jokes in movies and TV are great fun to look out for, most notably the Wilhelm Scream. I recently found an old one that’s been in several productions I’ve nerdily consumed, but I only just now had it pointed out to me: The Oscillation Overthruster from the movie, Buckaroo Banzai.
Just in case anyone hasn’t seen it, here’s the scene featuring the gizmo in question being installed by Buckaroo in his interdimensional Ford F350 pickup (slightly modified):
Since that just showed the prop in question, here’s what happened when he activated it.
Anyway, this prop has done some dimension-hopping all on its own, mostly in several Star Trek shows. It’s listed as a “geological and medical instrument” (you’ll have to scroll down to the heading). What took me forever to find was an image of its appearance in a season 4 episode of Babylon 5, “Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?” This may be the only image of it on the internet, probably due to how many years it’s been since the show aired coupled with it being pretty hard to see:
I ran across mention of JMS discussing a mysterious object called “the prop” and this is the rabbit hole it led me down. I’m not even sure what I was looking for when this became a minor obsession that inspired me to dig out my old B5 DVDs. Thank you all for this opportunity to purge it… until I hear it’s appeared in anything else.
It’s been a while, and what better time to rise from a blogging coma than (just after) Halloween?
In addition to everything else I’m up to, the past week was taken up by combining two chocolate milk mix containers, two old Tupperware bowls, a computer fan, and a lot of ribbon into a jetpack for my kid’s costume. I’d planned it for a while, but neglected to remember the deadline wasn’t Halloween per se, but the last school day before Halloween so he could wear it at school. Nothing eases last-minute costuming like willing spray paint to dry faster while not giving you brain damage from the fumes, am I right?
In the end, it looked pretty nifty. We’re trying to promise ourselves we’ll get him to nail down what he wants to dress as before October so we can gather materials, let glue dry, get building permits, etc.
He and I have also been playing first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with some friends of mine and his kids recently. It’s been going pretty well, with me as a hapless good-aligned cleric who has fallen in with a party of neutral-to-evil characters. So far, there’s been no call for me to cast a detect evil spell or anything, so he hasn’t cottoned on to his fellows’ proclivities towards doing terrible things. Given that all adventurers basically sally forth to kill and loot, alignment really hasn’t been an issue yet, though I’m sure the DM has a plan to rectify that eventually.
Even though I have the original sourcebooks on PDF, I pulled out some old copies of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook that I’d picked up at a yard sale a while ago. The previous owner had put those little file tabs on commonly referenced pages, so this became my “for use” copies while the books I grew up with remain in their hallowed places in my Bookshelf of Wonders. While my son and I were referencing them, I noticed that the original owner’s name and address were inscribed on the inside front covers. It wasn’t until last night that I did a quick Google search to see what their info would bring up.
They’d lived in Springfield, Missouri, which is several hours south of my home in Kansas City. I learned that they’d come to KC to pursue a career in theater and were working on a degree in that field. Anyone who has ever role-played probably doesn’t see this as much of a surprise, right? So they’d come here, brought their books, and then, if the name is the same as the one in my books, they passed away at quite a young age in 1997. I can’t even recall the sale where I’d picked his books up, and while I’m sure they were the last things his family was worried about, I bet they were at least kept as mementos, if not used for their intended purpose. The yellowing pages were well-read, with many tables highlighted, and a few careful repairs to the pages here and there.
I hope my own child gains an appreciation for RPG’s, and maybe these books will be a springboard into a new way to use his imagination. I thank the memory of the young man who kept these books all these years so I could pass them on to a little boy who just got his first sets of dice and some miniatures for the tabletop. I promise they’ll stay in service for a few more years at least, if not treasured for years beyond that.
Every few years, I try to get out to see fireworks. Not the ones being detonated, but those still in their plastic wrappers, often featuring art that owes its existence to an image search and a heavy dollop of Photoshop. I’m not calling them out to have their products recalled or anything, as fireworks are very “now and gone” products. It’s pretty rare to see the same ones year after year, so this is largely a kind of game I play to see if I can spot where someone decided to throw caution to the wind and get something thrown together before lunch.
Let’s start with… The Vigilante!
“Hola! Me llamo es Piscina de la Muerte!” I’d totally believe that Deadpool would somehow try to get money from lending his likeness to a line of fireworks, so perhaps this one isn’t as odd as I think.
Let’s look at another superhero, perhaps:
I’m pretty sure that whatever that’s supposed to be, it started out as Mighty Mouse.
This one is here just for being a clever pun:
Well, clever for firework packaging, right?
This is one of the more blatant ones:
Naturally, it’s Ghost Rider, and an image that was a comic book cover as well as art for a few other Marvel items, I believe.
Here’s one of just a few designs that I’ve seen that are totally not The Terminator:
This struck me as an odd choice, but what do I know about marketing fireworks?
I vaguely recalled the video of a “wacky arm-waving tube-man” conducting an orchestra, but it appears to have fallen off of the internet with only the image used on that package remaining.
My son found this one hilarious:
If only not-Sonic hadn’t encouraged him to sing “Gotta Go Fast” for the next half hour in the car…
This is one of those where I have to wonder how often anyone even tries to remember who the Pink Panther was:
This last one isn’t all that special from the art standpoint, as I recognized Batman from the Arkham Knight game right away:
…it’s what they did to his eyes. It took me a while to figure out what was bugging me, but I eventually realized it was that they put eyes on Batman’s forehead:
Forget the art tracing, this kind of shenanigans is what should get put on someone’s permanent record!
I’ve got a project I’ll hopefully be unveiling in the near future, but one thing that came in handy was this in-browser Fantasy Calendar Generator thing. It’s really great if you want something other than a reskinned version of our own calendar, but doing the math about how to get fifteen months into a 532-day year is just too spreadsheet-y to be fun. You can name your days, your months, set their lengths, even have astronomical events make regular appearances, and then you can save the calendar to your computer as a .json file that you can load back in whenever you want.
It’s a pretty nifty tool. My calendar has a three-day month in it called “Breen” that nobody likes to talk about, and the fact I can do that without causing the rest of the year to collapse into chaos gets this web application a thumbs up.
Image is the “Realms of Wonder” calendar from 1983. I have one in “hung on some kid’s wall” condition, which means it probably wouldn’t fetch the $50 asking price on Amazon.
