Blackmoor Vituperative

I am watching the special features on the “Revenge of The Sith” DVD, the third of the second set of Star Wars sequels.

People in the special features keep referring to how Lucas doesn’t know what he wants until he sees it, and that they just keep generating scenes and hope that eventually Lucas will string the pieces together to make a movie. “That’s what it’s like to work with George.” They come right out and say this, over and over.

He even says it, although he phrases it differently.

It’s hilarious to hear George Lucas talking about how if he had more control over Star Wars (the first movie), that X would have been Y, and W would have been Z, etc. Essentially, that if he’d had his way, Darth Vader would have been a huge puss all along and that Star Wars would have sucked.

How freaking delusional can one person be?

Happy New Year!

My sweetie and I spent New Year’s Eve at the Keswick Theatre near Philadelphia, seeing a three-movie marathon live performance of Cinematic Titanic. In the tradition of getting ram chips by saying good things and bad things about a movie, here goes!

Good thing: The Keswick Theatre is really nice. It’s probably the fourth or fifth nicest antique theatre in which I have seen a movie.

Bad thing: Being in a chair designed for someone born in the 1800s, between people whose figures are, shall we say, generous.

Good thing: Seeing folks from MST3K perform live! Whoo hoo! We had seen Mary Jo and Mike at GenCon back in the early 1990s, but this was even better.

Bad thing: Trace and Joel apparently have the same tailor.

Good thing: Trace still does a killer Barney Fife impression.

Bad thing: Joel’s “Gilbert Gottfried” internal monologues and “high pitched voice on the other end of the phone” routines weren’t funny in 1990, and still aren’t.

Good thing: The brothers on one side of us (shout out to Mike and Andrew! Happy new year!) were really friendly and fun to talk to.

Bad thing: The guy on the other side was alone, not interested in talking, and kept fiddling with his huge backpack (why? I never saw him take anything out of it or put anything into it — weird).

Good thing: Three twisted films, two of which I had never seen, and the third which was weird enough that I saw new weirdness even though I’d seen the film before. Good choices!

Bad thing: The aspect ratio was set incorrectly for the first movie (even though I saw them trying to correct it at the beginning — they left it distorted! Why?!), and the second movie was cropped to force it into a 4:3 aspect ratio, which ruined at least one joke. I don’t know why this does not bother other people as much as it does me, or why it is so difficult for people to figure out what seems so absurdly simple. Look, it does not matter what the shape of the screen is: adjust the aspect ratio until you see the whole image, without distortion. Don’t crop it, and don’t squeeze it in, out, up, or down to fit some arbitrary shape. Is that so freaking hard?

Good thing: Spending New Year’s Eve doing something completely new and different, and not being nauseous the next morning and wondering what happened after that third round of “candy corn” shots!

My sweetie and I spent our Christmas Eve watching a movie called Zombie Strippers, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I admit I had very low expectations from Zombie Strippers. I have recently seen a lot of bad attempts at horror-comedy, such as the atrocious Splatter Beach, and I expected no better from Zombie Strippers. To my surprise, it was funny, and gory, and had decent acting (far above par for the genre), and good writing, and the special effects were inventive and well done. In fact, the only thing that prevents it from being classified along with such classics like Evil Dead and Re-Animator is that there is no single standout performance (like Bruce Campbell or Jeffrey Combs in the aforementioned classics). But really, that’s a faint criticism. Zombie Strippers is probably the best horror movie I have seen in quite a while, and the best horror comedy I have seen in a very, very long time.

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” — Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819

“Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, An it harm none do what ye will.” — Doreen Valiente, 1964

“I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody business but by own.” — Billie Holiday

If you have not read it (or not read it lately), I suggest you spend some time with Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, by Peter McWilliams.

I recently encountered a mapping program intended for role-playing games, called Hexographer. It is an easy to use application that makes colorful game maps. There is a “free” version (not free as in speech — free as in beer), and a pay version. The free version is pretty nifty. However, if you use Hexographer, I do not recommend that you rely on the “free” version.

The online (free) version is a Java app. Under ordinary circumstances, you can simply download a Java app like this, and run it on your own computer. Why would you want to do this? Because web sites go down. They go away. (Remember Ar-Kelaan Hexmapper? Their Hexmapper software is available elsewhere, but the Ar-Kelaan site itself is no more.) It is a fact of life. If you want to be able to open your maps a few months from now, it is important that you be able to run the app locally. Unfortunately, the author of Hexographer has written the “free” app so that it can only be run on his server.

Do not rely on the “free” version. The paid license version does not have this problem, and that’s what I would recommend. (I bought it myself.)

However, if Hexographer does not suit your needs, here are some viable alternatives, which may or may not fit your own particular situation:

• Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper (download, additional tiles)
• DampfKarte
• HexMapper
• HexReMapper
• Inkscape with the boardgame extensions
• Maptool
• Tiled

P.S. The Welsh Piper has a nifty article on using hex maps to facilitate world building. Check it out.

Surprise Selection Shocks Nashville

NASHVILLE (The Borowitz Report) – President Barack Obama stunned the country music world today by picking up its highest honor, Country Music Entertainer Of The Year.

Mr. Obama was chosen unanimously, according to the Country Music Association, beating out such favorite as Carrie Underwood and Toby Keith.

In Nashville, country music insiders were shocked by Mr. Obama’s selection, given that he has only been in office for eight months and during that time has yet to record a single country song.

But Mr. Obama was gracious in receiving the honor, saying that he was “honored and humbled” by the award before excusing himself to accept this year’s Heisman Trophy.

I know what I want for Christmas: Eyeclops Nightvision Goggles. I have no idea what I would use them for. I probably would not even leave the apartment with them. But man, that is just too cool.

On October 2, 1959, the first episode aired of what would turn out to be a seminal work of science-fiction television. For the first time the famous four-note musical motif played, and for the first time Rod Serling told viewers that they were “entering a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” Yes, it may be hard to believe, but today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of The Twilight Zone.

The first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” and starring Earl Holliman, was written by Serling and very much set the tone for the series: Holliman plays a man, dressed in an Air Force jumpsuit, who wanders about a town that seems to have no other people in it, though has evidence of very recent habitation (food on the stove, burning cigarettes in ashtrays, etc.). It turns out (SPOILER ALERT) that he is imagining the whole thing, and that he’s actually been put in isolation to see if he can stay sane for a trip to the moon.

It’s safe to say that every science-fiction TV series since owes something to The Twilight Zone: in the fall of 1959, even “Doctor Who” and “The Outer Limits” were four years away from their premieres. Serling proved that science-fiction had a place on television. Many of the episodes may be obvious, even trite; but there are many excellent ones. Some have become classics, such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “To Serve Man,” and “Time Enough at Last.” And who will ever forget that most-deadpan-voice-ever style of Serling’s?

A substantial number of the show’s episodes are available for free online (for viewers in the U.S., at least), and we at GeekDad encourage you to celebrate today by watching a few of them. That’s a signpost up ahead. Your next stop: The Twilight Zone!

(from The Twilight Zone turns 50)

I have looked all over Richmond for black foamcore on which to mount my EZ Dungeons. I found some on Amazon for about $38 for a pack of 10.