Blackmoor Vituperative

I was feeling wacky, so I made this.

Tonight’s film fun was Lifeforce, starring Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, and a host of others. This is one of my all-time favourite movies, and unlike some movies from the 1980s, this is every bit as great now as it was the first time I saw it. Maybe even more so, since this is the Shout! Factory director’s cut on Blu-ray.

I just can’t express how awesome I think this movie is. Everyone is so perfectly cast. Steve Railback as the shell-shocked astronaut fighting his involuntary obsession with the Space Girl is perfect. Mathilda May as the Space Girl communicates through body language and expressions a range I am not sure any living actor could match. Peter Firth as the SAS colonel is as cool as James Bond and just a little bit pervy. Frank Finlay as the death-obsessed biologist is amusingly quirky and detached as only an English actor can be.

How could this movie have failed at the box office? Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakob on the script, John Dykstra on special effects, Henry Mancini on the soundtrack, Tobe Hooper at the helm… this is undoubtedly one of the best science fiction movies of the 1980s, and absolutely the best movie Golan-Globus ever produced. I have not yet watched the extensive special features, but I am looking forward to it.

THANK YOU, Shout Factory, for bringing this long-awaited director’s cut to Blu-ray!

A friend who has daughters shared with me this article about a guy who bought a Justice League board game to play with his daughter, only to find out there that there wasn’t a single female superhero in the game. Seriously?

I find it baffling that there are so few female characters in superhero movies, and that those few seem to get left out of the merchandising so often. I assume that women who like superheroes like female superheroes, and I know that guys like female superheroes (Black Widow was the best thing about the second Iron Man movie). So who is it at these marketing companies that keeps making the bone-head decision to drop Wasp from the Avengers but keep Hawkeye (a character so lame that he’s become the poster-child for ostensibly sexist comicbook art, overlooking the fact that any art with Hawkeye in it looks ridiculous), or to leave Gamorra out of the Guardians Of The Galaxy merchandise? We, the people who buy this stuff, totally dig the female characters (for different reasons maybe, but that’s okay). So who are the idiots in board rooms saying, “No, no, no! We can’t have Supergirl or Batgirl or Power Girl or Wonder Woman or Black Canary or Batwoman or Jade in this movie/game/poster/action figure set, that’s just crazy talk!”, and why are people still listening to them?

The board game story has a more or less upbeat (if not entirely happy) ending. Even so, the whole thing mystifies me, it truly does.

We just finished watching The Host (2013). I liked this movie much more than I expected. What if the Puppet Masters’ invasion had been successful, and years later, one of them had second thoughts about it?

I was expecting some kind of action-adventure chase movie, with lots of action scenes. In all fairness, there are a number of action scenes, but most of the movie is a character study, as the alien “Wanderer” and a number of humans get to know each other. What if the Puppet Masters were … people? What if they started to see us as people?

Give this movie a shot. You might be surprised.

The third Friday of August is Cult Movie Night at Castle Blackmoor. This month, we celebrate the career of Rutger Hauer with two of his most difficult-to-find films. First, we will view Fatherland (1994). Twenty years after Nazi Germany won World War 2, a German investigator and an American journalist uncover a conspiracy of terrible crimes committed during the war.

People who want to stay late will see the action-horror film Split Second (1992). This is a film about eating chocolate, drinking coffee, and getting “BIGGER GUNS!” Set in a near-future world where global warming has put the city of London under eight inches of water, Hauer plays a police detective hunting down a serial killer with a very familiar modus operandi.

Tonight has been Bad Vampire Movie night. We started with Dario Argento’s Dracula (2012), starring Rutger Hauer, who apparently got lost on the way to the movie and only showed up about a half-hour before the end. This was a more or less straight adaptation of Dracula, but I could not shake the feeling that it was a spoof of badly-dubbed Italian horror movies. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s just kind of dull. It’s not too bad, though: I have certainly seen far worse vampire movies.

The second movie was Dracula’s Widow (1988), starring no one. This was a late-1980s feature, filmed in widescreen, which is unusual for this kind of movie from that era. This, too, almost felt like a spoof, but it wasn’t. I bet Larry Blamire and cohorts could make a fantastic movie in this vein (so to speak). Again, it’s not a great movie, but I have seen much worse.

The final movie in our Bad Vampire Movie night is Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula (1978), starring a spectacularly well-trained Doberman and Michael Pataki (of Sidehackers fame) and José Ferrer (winner of the Academy Award and numerous Tony Awards, and the first actor to receive the National Medal of Arts). I am not sure how to describe this film. It’s the best-made movie of the three, in my opinion, but the plot is… strange. The first half-hour is literally the dog’s journey from Soviet Romania to Los Angeles (spoiler: he takes a boat). The second half-hour is a relatively uneventful camping trip (certainly no more terrifying than any of the camping trips I’ve been on). But if you like vampire movies, and you like dog movies, this is your movie: in addition to the title character, it features two German shepherds in prominent roles, and a fair number of canines in supporting roles. And you know, it’s nice seeing German Shepherds with healthy hips, before they got so inbred to please dog-show ghouls. Warning, though: a puppy dies about 45 minutes into the film. It’s not gratuitous or sadistic, though: it happens off-screen, and it’s not played for laughs or gore. If a softie like me can cope with it, small children and pregnant women should be able to handle it just fine (spoiler: the puppy shows up again later in the film). Oh, and there is a beautiful late-1960s Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible that José Ferrer drives around Los Angeles. Truly a beautiful classic American car.

I just watched Gravity with Susan Blackmoor. I had low expectations. After all, I have seen this movie before, when it was called Marooned and starred Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman. George Clooney is no Gregory Peck, and Sandra Bullock is no Gene Hackman. But when I’m wrong, I admit it: I enjoyed this a great deal. This was a spectacular homage to the “space adventure” movies of the 1950s and 1960s, back when manned rockets were new and people thought we might actually colonize the Moon and other planets. I highly recommend it.

I purchased Campaign Cartographer years ago, and have purchased many of the Annuals and add-ons from ProFantasy, yet I have never made the time to actually learn to use the program. I intend to change that. This is a list of tutorials by Joe Sweeney. Unfortunately, YouTube makes it difficult to view these tutorials in order, so I have compiled this list for my own reference. This list is based on a blog post by Mike Summers.

Setting Up Your Mapping Environment

Note 1: When you install Campaign Cartographer, right click on CC3Setup.exe and choose Run as administrator (don’t just use an Admin account).

Note 2: Do not install Campaign cartographer under “Program Files” or “Program Files (x86)”. Doing so will make it more difficult to add or modify symbol libraries later. I suggest that you install CC3 under “C:\Profantasy\CC3\”.

Part 1: Installation of CC3 and patches [2009-09-22]
Part 2: Installing DD3 [2009-09-22]
Part 3a: Installing Legacy CC2 add-ons to CC3 [2009-09-24] (superseded by Cosmographer 3)
Part 3b: Installing the CSUAC files [2009-12-17] (superseded by these instructions)

Overland Mapping with Campaign Cartographer

Part A: Introduction [2008-09-15]
Part B: New Maps and Creating Land [2008-11-02]
Part C: Contours [2008-11-02]
Part D: Automate Artistic Talents with Sheets [2008-11-02]
Part E: Adding Mountains with the Symbols Function [2008-11-02]
Part F: Adding Rivers [2008-11-02]
Part G: Vegetation [2008-11-02]
Part H: Rivers using Sheets and Effects [2008-11-02]
Part I: Structures using Symbols [2008-11-02]
Part J1: Text [2008-11-04]
Part J2: Text [2008-11-04]
Part K: Borders and Political Symbols [2008-11-04]
Part L: Handout Maps [2008-11-04]
Part M: Handout Maps, part 2 [2008-11-04]
Part N: Finishing Up [2008-11-04]

Mapping an Entire Fantasy World with Fractal Terrains and Campaign Cartographer

Part 1: The Basics [2010-04-05]
Part 2: Outputting Multiple Maps at Different Levels of Scale [2010-07-26]
Part 3: Customizing Exported Maps [2010-08-02]

Dungeon Mapping with Dungeon Designer

Tutorial 1a: Basics [2008-11-04]
Tutorial 1b: Basics [2008-11-04]
Tutorial 1c: Basics [2008-11-04]
Tutorial 2a: Making a Battlemap [2008-12-02]
Tutorial 2b: Making a Battlemap [2008-12-02]
Tutorial 3a: Advanced Techniques [2009-01-12]
Tutorial 3b: Advanced Techniques [2009-01-13]
Tutorial 3c: Advanced Techniques [2009-01-13]
Tutorial 3d: Advanced Techniques [2010-01-31]
Mapping Dungeons, Part 1 [2013-08-18]
Mapping Dungeons, Part 2: Traps and Secret Rooms [2013-08-19]
Mapping Dungeons, Part 3: Grids [2013-08-20]

Battle Tiles

Essentials Part 1 (The New Templates) [2009-12-07]
Essentials Part 2 (Finishing Your First Room) [2009-12-07]
Essentials Part 3 (Printing) [2009-12-07]
The Crypt – Part 1 (The Entrance & Multipoly Tool) [2009-12-09]
The Crypt – Part 2 (Inner Walls & Adding Symbols) [2009-12-09]
The Crypt – Part 3 (Complex Room with Curved Alcoves) [2009-12-09]
The Crypt – Part 4 (Manually Drawing Walls) [2009-12-10]
The Crypt – Part 5 (Creating Secret Layers) [2009-12-10]
The Crypt – Part 6 (Last Two Rooms & Putting it All Together) [2009-12-10]
Raised Floors [2009-12-13]

Old School D&D Mapping

Part 1 [2013-02-15]
Part 2: Control Points [2013-02-20]
Part 3: Varicolor [2013-02-26]
Part 4: Exporting a Symbol Catalog [2013-02-27]
Part 5: Using Your New Symbols [2013-03-04]
Part 6: Creating Mapping Tools [2013-03-19]
Part 7: Create a Tool That Creates Floors and Walls [2013-03-20]
Part 8: Automating Grids [2013-04-04]

Starship Design and Mapping using Campaign Cartographer and Cosmographer

Part 1 [2010-12-26]
Part 2 [2010-12-26]

Star System Maps using Campaign Cartographer and Cosmographer

Part 1 [2011-01-15]
Part 2 [2011-01-15]
Part 3 [2011-01-16]
High-Space System Mapping Tutorial [2013-08-06]

High Space Battlemaps

Part 1: Creating A Guide Map [2012-06-19]
Part 2: Mapping the Command Deck [2012-06-19]
Part 3: Mapping The Bridge [2012-06-19]
Part 4: Printing and Outputting Maps for Play [2012-06-19]

Symbol Management

Changing the Size of Symbols [2010-03-31]
Creating custom symbol catalogs from PNG files [2012-06-01]
Attaching custom symbol catalogs to mapping buttons in Campaign Cartographer [2012-06-01]
Importing PNG files [2013-07-10]

Techniques

Aligning side view and floor plans [2013-01-26]
Understanding Layers and Sheets in Campaign Cartographer [2013-03-07]

Mapping Master Class for Campaign Cartographer

Sheets and Effects, Part 1 [2010-12-31]
Sheets and Effects, Part 2 [2011-01-01]
Sheets and Effects, Part 3 [2011-01-12]
Sheets and Effects, Part 4 [2011-01-12]
Sheets and Effects, Part 5 [2011-01-13]
Sheets and Effects, Part 6 [2011-01-13]

Speed Mapping

Creating an Sino-Block Orbital [2013-03-06]
Treasure Map [2014-01-22]
Into the Remnant [2014-01-26]
Creating a draft Dieselpunk Star Map [2014-01-27]
Creating a Space Station Construction Symbol Library [2014-01-31]

“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18, King James Bible “Authorized Version”, Cambridge Edition)

I feel sorry for Ken Ham, because it seems to me, from listening to him, that he has “faithed” himself into a corner. He has convinced himself that his life only has meaning if a specific set of “facts” are never contradicted. He’s set up this construct in his head where his life only has value if his god exists, and his god only exists if his interpretation of a book he has read is infallible and factual. Therefore, he has to struggle to find more and more outlandish explanations for why his interpretation of a book is not contradicted by the real world around him. Because if he’s wrong about that book, or that book is in error, then he concludes that his god does not exist, and therefore his life has no meaning.

“My understanding of [anything] must be absolutely correct, or else my life has no meaning. I must therefore oppose anything which contradicts my understanding of [anything].”

The vanity of such a position is staggering. It would be funny if it were not so tragic, and so avoidable.