Blackmoor Vituperative

All of us are like excited children when turned loose for a fun-filled day at an amusement park. The commotion of the enthusiastic crowd combines with mouthwatering scents of delicious snacks waiting to be gobbled up, and then mingles with flashing lights and pounding music from rides and attractions. Yet when an amusement park becomes abandoned and an eerie silence descends to blanket the decay, the atmosphere seems to twist and takes on a nightmarish vibe. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, leaving Six Flags as another of its victims. Here are 69 uber-creepy urban exploration photographs as we tour the abandoned amusement park Six Flags New Orleans.

(from Uber Creepy Tour: Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans, Web Urbanist)

From the West End Games Fan Site forum:

Princes of the Universe Needs you!!!

PREVIEW SAMPLE
http://www.godsendagenda.com/art/PotU_Sample.pdf

HELLAS was never intended to be just a single role-playing game — from the very start we had planned five books, and the second one even had a name: Princes of the Universe (after the Queen song). This book would expand the HELLAS universe in new and exciting ways, allowing players to see who the movers and shakers of the HELLAS universe were, both heroic and villainous.

As with HELLAS, we had planned Princes of the Universe (and, indeed, all the books in the series) to be an experience — full color, high-quality artwork, glossy cover, the works — and so POTU was designed that way from the very start. It’s truly a sight to behold.

That’s where you come in.

The number one thing you can do to help is spread the word. When you visit gaming sites and forums drop the HELLAS name and talks about your experience with the book. Direct people who may be interested in a good sci-fi game to the webpage and to the Kickstarter site.

With your help, we will be able to print Princes of the Universe in the way it deserves to be printed: in full color. All we’re asking is for your help and support now. If we can get enough support before our deadline, we’ll be able to augment our current printing funds with your added money and print our book in color.

We’re not asking you to spend more than you would normally spend for the book, but if you want to then we’re offering additional benefits for additional pledges, as you can plainly see on the Kickstarter page.

Here is the link http://kck.st/aZUGdU

Thanks for your help.

I wish these guys the best of luck. Publishing a role-playing game and breaking even (much less making a profit) is much more difficult now than it was back in the mid-1990s. They will need all the help they can get.

I want to run a gritty science fiction game or a modern fantasy game, using d6 Space, d6 Fantasy, and/or d6 Adventure. If I run the modern fantasy game, it’ll be in my Rough Magic setting. If it’s a science fiction game, I want to make up a new setting. I am tentatively calling it ZeroSpace. Here’s a blurb:

The Thousand Worlds are at war, and have always been at war: with the Veejhad, the Shi, and countless other enemies. Some are human. Some are not. Some are powerful. Some are hardly even worth mentioning. Some are outside of the Imperium. Some are within. Still, the wars rage on, as they always have, and they always will, using weapons that can destroy planets and viruses that selectively infect family members of known dissidents.

But that is far away. If you have seen combat, it was at least a couple of years ago.

The people of the Thousands Worlds are privileged beyond imagining. For the wealthy and the powerful, there is no disease, no hunger, no death, and no wish unfulfilled.

But you are neither wealthy nor powerful. You have known both hunger and disease, and no regen tank, clone bank, or offline personality backup will replace you when you die.

You are a member of the Imperial Grand Survey, part of the skeleton crew of Remote Observer Station 1AC5, a sensor array pointed into the darkness at the edge of the Outer Rim.

You see a supply ship every six months. The most recent was two months ago.

Your assignment is for five years. You have at least two years to go.

You aren’t going to make it to five.

I am supposed to be playing in a Morrow Project game this evening, using GURPS. I have been reading the rules for GURPS (GURPS Lite, which is free to download).

I am debating whether to play or not. I said that I would, so I feel that I should, but I have been reading the GURPS rules, and there are so many things that I dislike (bad mechanics, like bell curve rolls; inconsistent mechanics, like sometimes needing to roll low, and sometimes needing to roll high; overcomplicated mechanics, like literally a dozen different weapon skills; etc.). I do not want to be the guy who comes to a game and complains about the rules the whole time. That’s no fun for anyone.

I am still a little behind on my classwork, so I should be working on that anyway.

Once I chose the color scheme (with the help of my modest Photoshop skills), I started the task of modifying the real thing. Here we go, step by step.

This is how it always starts.

First, we take it apart. I used masking tape to keep the screws together. After I had more than a few pieces to keep track of, I started labeling them and putting them into ziploc bags.

Everything has been disassembled and lightly sanded.

Everything has been washed and is drying.

The bits and pieces have been labeled and placed into ziploc bags. Note the bag labeled “unknown spring”. Yes, I have already lost track of where something goes. Sigh.

These are the ornamental bits I bought at Michael’s. The curlicue flourishes were something like $5 a pair, while the bag of little oval things was about $5 for a dozen.

And now those are lightly sanded and washed, as well.

The decorative bits are glued on (with cyanoacrylate), things have been washed again, and are drying.

Everything has been given a couple of coats of satin black.

I assembled most of the large parts (without screws), and took a photo to use as the basis of my color tests. There is probably a word for assembling something without using the screws, but I do not know what it is.

I thought the cylinder deserved its own photo.

This is the first coat of “antique brass”. I will go over this lightly with “brass”.

Masking off the cylinder was the single most time-consuming part. There are at least 50 individual pieces of masking tape on this thing.

This should be the last thing I need to mask off: the upper receiver, under the slide.

I painted the upper receiver black, and then gave it a mist of silver. I think that this gives it a nice retro “steel” look.

And naturally, the black paint seeped past the masking tape, and the masking tape stuck to the silver and pulled it off. I tried using some acetone to take the black off, and that did nothing, nothing, nothing… and then went through all of the layers of paint down to the yellow plastic. Son of a…

Okay. So I re-masked and then re-painted it (just in the damaged areas, to the best of my ability), and it looks okay. In retrospect, I should have sanded the edges of the damaged areas, because you can see those edges if you look carefully. But screw it: the whole point of steampunk is that things are hand-made, not mass-produced in a factory, so some minor flaws are acceptable.

Here we are. All the pieces have been painted, and are ready for assembly. You may not be able to tell in this photo, but I used a brush to paint some black in the creases and edges, to give the parts a “used” and slightly dirty look.

As I assembled the pieces, I used a kind of dry teflon-based lubricant on the moving parts. I think that this was a huge improvement over the silicone gel I used to lubricate the prototype.

Assembly has begun! And wouldn’t you know, I still do not know where that mystery spring goes. Not only that, but I have a mystery screw, now, too. I stared at it for a good long while, but eventually I had to give up and go disassemble my unmodified Nerf Maverick for comparison.

I immediately saw where the mystery spring was, but it took a long time for me to spot the mystery screw. It’s inside of the indexing mechanism.

And here we are: all done!

The best thing — well, maybe not the best, but a great thing — is that it works! My prototype fails to fire about 85% of the time. I think that is partly because it has so many layers of paint, and also because I used silicone gel for lubrication. Rev 6A has, at most, half the layers of paint that the prototype has, and I used a dry teflon-based waxed lubricant on the moving parts.

All in all, I am very pleased.

I have one thing left to do, but it will need to wait a while, because work and school are keeping me busy: I want to put black leather on the grip, where it is currently painted black.

This is my second attempt to modify a Nerf Maverick for steampunk costuming purposes. (My first attempt was in March 2010.)

I will eventually post all of the photos of this process online, but this blog post is specifically to address the color scheme. Rather than paint over and over until I like the colors, as I did with the prototype, I have decided to use Photoshop to try and apply different color schemes to see how I like them.

This is a photo of the gun with most of the parts placed where they are supposed to go, with the base coat of satin black.

This is what it would look like painted solid gold.

This is what it would look like painted solid brass.

This is what it would look like painted solid caramel metallic.

This is what it would look like painted solid copper. A friend of mine says this makes it look like it’s made of chocolate. Chocopunk!

This is what it would look like painted solid steel.

Color scheme 01. I don’t like the gold on the decorations. I thought that I would.

Color scheme 02. Base color is gold. I think it looks garish.

Color scheme 03. Brass with a lot of copper highlights. I like this one.

Color scheme 04. Brass with a bit less copper. I like this one better.

Color scheme 05. Black highlights on the slide and frame. Not too bad.

Color scheme 06. There are things I like about this color scheme, but I think it has too many colors. I do like the black on the grip.

Color scheme 07. I kept the black on the grip, and simplified the color scheme a bit. Still not quite right.

Color scheme 08. Black on the grip, simpler color scheme, and the flourishes are not highlighted at all. I think that this is the scheme I will use, but I will sleep on it.

Color scheme 09. Copper slide, and the decorations on the slide and frame are highlighted. I think I like scheme 08 better.

Color scheme 10. Black grip, black highlights, some more color on the cylinder.

Color scheme 11. Same as 10, but with caramel frame and slide decorations.

Color scheme 12. Something different: black frame, brass and copper highlights.

Color scheme 13. Same as 10, but with copper frame and slide decorations.

So many interesting things are happening. My new classes start on June 1: CCJS 105, Introduction to Criminology, and CMSC 230 Computer Science II. After I finish these two classes, the rest will all be upper-level (300 and 400). I am currently 36 credits away from my Computer Science degree. I have been debating whether to get a minor in Criminology, but that would add six credits to what I still need. I am not certain that it is worth it.

I had a great job interview today, with a small marketing company that helps nonprofit organizations (and, less often, for-profit organizations) organize fund-raising events. They say that I am one of the “lead candidates”; I have a second interview scheduled for next week. I have high hopes for this. Working for a small business, helping make the world a little bit better, and still working in IT is pretty much the trifecta of what I would like to do for a living.

In other news, I picked up all five (yes, five — I was surprised there are this many) Return Of The Living Dead movies on Ebay for $21 including shipping. Not a bad deal! I think that is how I will be spending my Memorial Day weekend. I have seen the first one (which is great), and I think I have seen the third one, but the rest are unknown to me.

And I am still coughing, but much less frequently, and less forcefully, then I was.

I had a little bit of free time today, so I whipped up a couple of dynamic affiliate links for DriveThruRPG, a very cool source of gaming PDFs.

The script can be called one of three ways. One way creates an affiliate link to one of the five newest items added to DriveThruRPG, the second creates an affiliate link to one of the five best-selling items, and the third creates a random link to an item on either list. I considered animating the affiliate links, so that a different item would appear every few seconds, but to be frank, animated advertisements annoy me. Actually, I do not care for advertisements at all — I hide them, as a matter of fact.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe. However, these are not just advertisements — they are also news. For that reason, I think they are useful, even to people like me who routinely hide ads.

It’s my intention to add these to this blog and to RPG Library, the gaming community site I maintain, but I do not really expect to see much revenue from these. I mainly created them as a service to the gaming community. For that reason, I added a variable so that other people can replace my affiliate ID with their own, if they would like to use these on their own web site.

So check it out. If you have any questions, let me know, and I will try to answer them.

Update 2010-05-25: I added some error-checking in case the description field in DriveThruRPG’s RSS feed contains some bad tags. It doesn’t actually do anything with the errors, but it keeps the script from failing.

Update 2010-05-25, part 2: I expanded the script to be able to handle any of OneBookShelf’s sites.

In case you missed the Lost series finale, here it is:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!

With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled?

Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

It looks like I will soon have a gig with a company out of New York doing more or less what I would have done for the ebook publishing company, had I not screwed that up beyond repair. Just consulting work so far, but they are talking about bringing me on full-time. I am still kicking myself over throwing away the opportunity with the ebook company, but having a job will ease the pain the bit. More than a bit: it seems like a really good company. Small, well-funded, and with a product that isn’t going away any time soon.

I need to stop thinking about that ebook job. Regret serves no useful purpose. Ah, well.

By the way, Portal is free on Steam until May 24.

P.S. And when you’re dead I will be still alive.