20080528

20080521

by crom, by mitra, and by set!

If I don't post any pictures at the sister blog this week, it's because:

A.) My laptop is moving into the realm of "completely and utterly non-functional" as its wireless card, one of its USB ports, and its PC card reader are now down, leaving me with no way to pull photos off my camera until I get a card reader for my desktop, and no good way to edit photos until I install Photoshop on my desktop.

B.) Age of Conan came out.

20080518

my new favorite marvel comics continuity issue

"Belasco - A lot of doubt and questions have arose over Belasco's account of his and Dante Alighieri's journey to Pangea. I tend to agree that it is highly unlikely that the ancient Pangeans' amusement park would so closely resemble Greek and Christian beliefs about Hell. Therefore it is extremely probable that Belasco reconfigured the park based on "The Inferno," and not that the park inspired Dante. So what is unknown is exactly when Belasco first journeyed to Pangea. Presumably it was after the 1320's, when Dante Alighieri's "The Inferno" was published, but it could have been anytime afterwards. Also unknown is how he lost his arm."

Edit: maybe it is late and I am easily amused, but I also love that step one of the Atlantean's plan to take over the Earth using the power of the Serpent Crown is to get a bunch of magic artifacts, melt them down, and build a bigger Serpent Crown.

20080517

my new favorite invasive plant

Trumpet creeper is so good at climbing wood that it's impossible to remove from walls without breaking the wall, and sometimes it dismembers trees. In the south, it's nicknamed Hellvine.

My least favorite is blackberries, by the way.

my new favorite advertising company

Is Publicis.

20080515

let's talk about love

Not that love, that love can go fuck itself. I mean Love, an MMO that's being developed by just one guy, through the magic of procedural content. I absolutely want to see Love more than any other video game coming up, but ambitious projects like this tend to fail. Will Love follow the same fate? I don't know, because there's really almost no information about the game up there whatsoever. Even the screen shots don't seem like they're actual screen shots. What kind of game is it? What do you do? What does it look like? All I know is that it allows multiple players to shape the world simultaneously. I imagine it as a cross between Shadow of the Colossus and a flower. But right now Love is whatever you want it to be.

20080508

i guarantee that i am actually working on this

For Legend of the Five Rings, I took like half the official map (centered around Crane, Scorpion, and Lion territory) and copied it onto a big sheet of paper, in large flowchart-like form. Each point of interest gets its own little location node, making for about 120 locations. I wrote a rough plot outline for each of those, so wherever you go there's something reasonably interesting to do. That's stage one. Here's some of the more interesting ones, basically spoiler-free, since the game might never even go to these places:

In a gambling-based city where everyone wears masks, one of the players is mistaken for somebody else and ends up targeted by assassins.

Rumor is spreading around a port city that the Mantis Clan is press-ganging ronin into their navy, and tensions are high. A ronin stumbles into a tavern beat up, claiming he escaped a press gang. The drunken ronin all start a riot and capture the Mantis embassy. Imperial troops arrive, looking to kill every ronin in the city, including the players.

A bitter student at the Doji Courtier Academy wants to hire the party to get revenge on the most popular girl in school.

A samurai child runs away from his parents to live the ronin life, trying to join up with the players.

The players arrive at the Shrine of Lost Sailors to find it abandoned, with no signs of violence and no convenient journals lying around.

A peasant girl's parents hire the players to escort her to the city to be trained as a geisha by the Scorpion Clan. She, however, would much rather run away with her lover.

The peasants in an extremely superstitious village believe the players to be ghosts when they arrive at the village.