Links of the Moment

Be warned. Act III of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is live.

I tell you what - The Dark Knight last night, now this. Ooof.

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a brand new day, and Act II of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is presented for your enjoyment!

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Act I of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is up.

Go and watch.

Posted by IMAGinES at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In case you didn't already know - and I didn't, I only just found out about this today via the SCIFI Channel - Joss Whedon (yes, him) is experimenting a little with alternate modes of broadcasting after the writer's strike. His effort, starring Neil Patrick Harris (yes, him) and Nathan Fillion (yes, him too), will be webcast for but a few days from July 15th to 19th.

It's called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Support it. Or know the taste of DOOOOOOOMAH!

Posted by IMAGinES at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know I'm behind the eight-ball here by about four years, but this deserves the word-spreading to even those already pwnz0red. With thanks to The Escapist, here's a web-comedy called Pure Pwnage; the story of a gamer named Jeremy and his ongoing battle to pwn all the n00bs.

And maybe get a girl.

If he's extremely lucky.

Posted by IMAGinES at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hot off the virtual press, The Escapist dedicates an issue to Epic Games, the makers of the Unreal series of games and, naturally, Gears of War - and the last article is "I've Got To Be A Macho Man", dissecting the broad critical agreement that the latter game is adolescent homoerotic trash that shouldn't have been the success it was.

Maybe I'll pick the sequel up after all...

Posted by IMAGinES at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Before I get stuck back into renovating the bedroom, I just thought I'd let you know about a news story broken by online agency The Onion, detailing fan concerns that the feature film adaptation of the Iron Man trailer might ruin the much-beloved ninety-second action-fest with almost an hour and a half of extended scenes and additional dialogue. I'll be going to see the adaptation this evening, so I'll make my on call then, but I'm heartened by blogger Mr. Teuflel's comment that the film does indeed do the trailer justice.

Another hot story also broken by The Onion is veteran NASCAR coach Dan Amon's revelation of the strategy for success used by every race winner: Drive fast.

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Okay, here’s some unusual linkage of the moment. Now, as should be obvious from the last post, I’ve been playing a lot of the Halo 3 lately, enough that Vickie’s been feeling a bit slighted, so I know I need to put the brakes on some. Still, at the moment, she’s watching A Touch of Frost on Seven, so I nipped upstairs to bask in the glory of my Halo 3 Service Record, all the more radiant tonight as I achieved a Team Slayer Skill of 20 earlier this evening and got promoted straight from Lieutenant Grade 3 to Captain Grade 3! Yay!

Anyway, I also checked the Bungie.net news feed, and at the top of the list was “MLG ESPN Saturday Night Rebroadcast Available Now”. For those of you who, like me, don’t live in the US, the acronyms might need a little explaining. ESPN is, as I understand it, North America’s largest pay-TV sports provider (if the URL is an indicator, they're part of Disney's media conglomerate). While I don’t think I’ve ever known exactly what ESPN stands for (I think I’m safe in assuming the S is for “sport” and the N is for “network”), I do know what MLG stands for: Major League Gaming. That’s right, a major media outlet has dedicated a portion of its resources to covering (and hosting) video game tournaments.

Continue reading "36 Rounds - 2 Grenades - 25 Kills - HIKE!" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just thought I'd hip you all to a neat little podcast by a pair of fans (and GMs) of the Star Wars Saga Edition roleplaying game. The hosts talk about general Saga Ed. system matters (the second show has an interesting discussion on why it's better to multiclass into Jedi than take it at level 1), particular issues (is the Ithorian bellow too overpowered? did the Gamorrean get boned in Saga?) and general silliness (including guest spots from good-ole-Stormtrooper TK-421 and postcards from Commander Cody).

The home page is here, and you can subscribe via your favourite podcast manager here.

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those of you who know Vickie and I pretty well know that we’re both fans of a science fiction author called Spider Robinson, mainly because his works are almost always (a) fun and (b) filled with honest to god hope for the future of our species. We’re not sure whether we’ve managed to successfully hip others to his work, but I’m hoping that those we’ve not managed to snare the interest of so far will get hooked on his weekly podcast called “Spider on the Web”. It’s a combination of readings from his books – Spider has a great, mellow speaking voice, and he even puts up several chapters of his professional audio recording of his latest book, Variable Star, a posthumous collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein – and some excellent music; he’s already hipped me to New Orleans sax player Breeze Cayolle, given me my first taste of John Coltrane and introduced his in-laws, who are bloody great musos too.

Continue reading "Spider on the Web" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although I am 360-less at the moment, I can still find ways to itch my scratch. With thanks to the fine ladies and gentlemen of Bungie, here's one of them: Halotivational Posters, a site set up (as may be obvious from the title) for the publication of motivational posters created using screengrabs from Halo 3. I nearly wet my pants several times reading it. I've learned that all a poster needs is an incoming rocket to set me off.

Posted by IMAGinES at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now you might be thinking, "Mattel lead-paint scare", but this isn't some consumer-advocacy site. See, every now and again I catch myself looking at my small collection of Optimus Primes, thinking how a repaint and a drybrush would really bring out all that detail on the bland grey plastic bits (especially movie Optimus). Considering the amount of disassembly and reassembly the effort would require is enough to put me off, though.

Continue reading "Dangerous Toys" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I used to think that the Peugeot Hoggar was the closest we'd ever get to an actual, working Warthog. Then the Bungie lads not-so-subtly hinted in their most recent podcast that those talented lads and lasses in the Land of the Long White Cloud - by which I mean, the Oscar-winning Weta Workshop - had put together something man-size and probably driveable for a series of Halo-based short films being directed by the man pegged by Peter Jackson to helm the aborted film version of the video game.

Now, there is proof. Click the link and scroll to the bottom of the page. Yes, that's a real dude manning the AA cannon in back.

Posted by IMAGinES at 01:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As you may be able to imagine, being the owner of two largish, wilful dogs isn't the eaiest of experiences, especailly when they need to be walked regularly to stay healthy and fit. We have a couple of books on the care and training of dogs, but they've been a little initmidating in terms of all the stuff they seem to reckon I need to know to do the job properly.

Thankfully, Vickie found a website for a five-minute ABC TV show called Wagging School (our overseas audience mightn't realise that the title's actually a pun on some local slang). It contains each episode of the show, which centres on training your dog a particular command. It emphasises repetition and regularity in training, something I've not quite been able to nail down yet, but we've bought some dog treats and I'll start getting stuck in on Friday evening.

Posted by IMAGinES at 02:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A year and a half ago I submitted my information to a tool called "FindPlay", which was intended to help people in the RPG hobby find hobbyists of similar interest. Recently, after a period of downtime, FindPlay was superseded by NearbyGamers, a site with improved functionality and a viewable map (using Google Maps).

So far I'm the only gamer in the Cairns region to put a pin into the map, so I'm hoping that by getting the word out to others the local gamer density will manifest itself.

Posted by IMAGinES at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve been sampling the wonderment that is an iPod nano for the past couple of months now. Young Brook’s hand-me-down is now full of Steely Dan, Def Leppard, The War of the Worlds, Flogging Molly and assorted other musics (yeah, okay, fine, including John Farnham). Bu the really great thing about it, especially combined with its iTunes master application, is podcasts. The iTunes service will track podcast feeds via XML and RSS and will automatically download the latest shows of any podcasts I subscribe to. I can take them with me in the iPod and catch up on subjects of interest during my lunch hour, all without bothering Vickie with any annoying voices or accents.

So what am I subscribed to?

Continue reading "Podcast Preferences" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Curse you and your evil birthday presentness, Gavin Lucan.

Curse you to... I dunno. Boils or something.

Everyone else: Irish folk pub rock. It's good.

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

At the less than one day (bare hours, even) and counting mark, it was probably inevitable that I trip over the Internet Movie Database's main page and fall upon a link to an article on the Wired magazine website. With a title like, "The Rebirth of Optimus Prime: Behind the Scenes with Director Michael Bay" it naturally grabbed my attention. It's a neat little three-page examination of fandom in general (I keep having flashbacks to the forum outrage when Battlestar Galactica was being re-imagined by the SciFi Channel) and the interest in Transformers - well, in one red-and-blue Transformer - in particular. I think it puts across a lot of what I was trying to do in this article, but a lot better.

Continue reading "A Deeper Examination of the Prime-al Urge" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

With less than three days to go until the nationwide premiere (four days ahead of the US! Woo!), a link to the official Australian website of the Transformers movie is long overdue - probably because I only just discovered it. It looks as though I'll see it twice this weekend - first on Saturday, as part of the "Help Rob Frantically Cling To His Youth While It Lasts" pre-birthday party, then again on Sunday with my young mentee.

While I'm on the topic, here's a review of the movie written by the lads at computer magazine Atomic. Now, if this film needed savaging, I was fully expecting that the performance-happy nerds at Atomic would provide. Their review, however, manages to ably critique the film whilst giving very little away, and their verdict is "Michael Bay shows the doubters it was in safe hands all along", giving the film a heartening 8.5 out of 10.

Posted by IMAGinES at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a neat little toy for everyone with an Xbox 360 and a Live gamertag: 360voice.com. It uses your Xbox Live profile to generate a web log which appears as if it was written by your Xbox. Mine's here, although as of this writing I've not done enough gaming for it to write about (it seems my Xbox is a classic SF fan, though). In the meantime, check out the blog of the Xbox of evilhayama, the man who hipped me to this site.

Posted by IMAGinES at 04:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the latest DM of the Rings, with a very, very true commentary on RPG combats.

If there's one thing I always worry about as a GM, it's making combats interesting, and it's probably my prime worry with the somewhat stat-heavy tactical combat system in Heavy Gear. I have some ideas about that, though, which I will detail later.

Posted by IMAGinES at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's another linky by way of The Gavmeister (yes, I know, "Gavmeister" means "master of Gav", and he is Gav, but my old school motto was "vincit qui se vincit" which translates to "he conquers who conquers himself", so it's my way of saying don't mess with Gavin or he'll, you know, go all conquest on yo' ass).

Anyway, it's a sorta-webcomic, using screengrabs from the Lord of the Rings films as individual frames. It's also a wonderful satire of the type of social interactions that arise whenever a group of geeks sit down around a table and play Dungeons & Dragons. It starts here, but frankly, episode number thirty-seven (and it's just caught up with the end of the first film) is the best summary of why many find the Grandfather of Roleplaying Games pretty damned frustrating.

Posted by IMAGinES at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of links from the mentor training Vickie and I underwent over the last couple of days:

• Jeanette Harvey, our principal trainer for the whole course. She was warm, welcoming, fantastically focused and kept the whole group endeavour ticking over at a good, smooth pace. I'm sure she'd make a brilliant game master.
• Megan Bayliss, who spoke to us for an hour about the tasks of adolescence - where a person needs to be at the end of it and how they get there - and how to listen actively. Megan's personal web log focuses on child support but also touches on broader community affairs.

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm going to be writing a longer, Christmas-related post later on today, but in the meantime I hope you'll forgive my nerdish enthusiasm as I point you toward the new teaser trailer for the TransFormers movie.

Yeah, I wanna see this film. Probably gonna have about as much plot as Independence Day (interesting choice of release dates, there), but considering I saw that film at the cinema four times I doubt I'll care.

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I think I might be making some headway in getting the Battlefield 2142 demo to work. After discovering a couple of threads that mentioned disabling your router’s firewall (not likely, chum), I decided to have a look at my router’s settings this morning in the hope of finding an alternative solution. When I saw the “port forwarding” settings, a lightbulb went on over my head. I ran a search for “’Battlefield 2142’ port forwarding” and this little gem of a website came up. I’ve followed its instructions, but didn’t have a chance to try BF2142 before I dashed off to work. I’ll give it a quick whirl this evening, though.

I’m also wondering whether there are any settings that will allow me to Direct Host a game of Dawn of War. Question answered: It does. And I just realised I set up all the port forwards for BF2142 wrong as well - the IP address has to be the static-IP address for my PC, not the router! Duh! Better get that fixed tonight...

Posted by IMAGinES at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bronze Chef dug this up on YouTube, and I'd claim it as my theme song had he not already claimed it as his:

"Weird Al" Yankovic's "White and Nerdy"

UPDATE: On Weird Al's MySpace, I have discovered another theme song, one for Karl and Vickie both: "Hardware Store"!

UPDATE AGAIN (2 Oct 06): Okay, so maybe it's not my theme song:

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Posted by IMAGinES at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From the BBC News Service:

To reach the Grave of Christ or Kristo no Hakka as it is known locally, you need to head deep into the northern countryside of Japan, a place of paddy fields and apple orchards. Halfway up a remote mountain surrounded by a thicket of bamboo lies a mound of bare earth marked with a large wooden cross... according to the local legend, Jesus did not die at Calvary.

His place was taken by one of his brothers, who for some reason is now buried by his side in Japan.

The story goes that after escaping Jerusalem, Jesus made his way across Russia and Siberia to Aomori in the far north of Japan where he became a rice farmer, married, had a family and died peacefully at the age of 114.

Read more.

Posted by IMAGinES at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Found out about this webcomic via the RPGnet Roleplaying Open thread with the motivational posters (yep, it's still going). It's a grand epic of passion, romance and old-time civilisation swept away in the harsh light of a nuclear explosion, with -

Oh, who am I kidding? It's the closest you'll ever get to Red Vs. Blue, the Webcomic. Which means it's funny.

Go. Read. Better yet, start where I started.

Posted by IMAGinES at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may remember that a couple of years ago I was a regular browser of Doc's Blog. It was run by a gent named Mitch, and in the midst of the usual personal updates and ponderings he posted what he called Game Dreams (based on Ginger Stampley's Game WISHes), topics on roleplay gaming (and gaming in general) intended to spark discussion. In late 2004, Mitch decided to shut the blog down, mainly due to lack of time to work on it.

I e-mailed Mitch a little while ago to see how he was doing, and he gave me a link to his next web log, The Bronze Chef. At the time, though, it was pretty much a placeholder while he fiddled with the back-end. Nonetheless, I put a link up (with a "Coming Soon" rider) in my "Web Logs" links section.

Just today, Mitch sent me an e-mail notifying me that The Bronze Chef has now gone live, and quite frankly, it looks great! I've taken the "Coming Soon" sign down and will be browsing there again regularly.

Posted by IMAGinES at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two Links of the Moment for you today. The first is Shortpacked!, a nigh-on daily webcomic about the staff of a non-chain toy store. If, like me, you never quite grew out of all those cool toys you collected as a kid (or never grew out of them at all), you'll find a lot to like here, including one man's quest across the toy stores of his city to find an Alternators Prowl. If not, you'll likely enjoy the silly, risque and at times rude humour of a bunch of disparate characters working at dead-end jobs - sorta like Clerks at the toy store. I like it so much that I've added it to my "Fun" links!

Speaking of Toys, here's your second Link of the Moment: Teletraan-1, the unofficial Transformers Wiki. As you've probably guessed, I've already made a contribution or two, mainly around the IDW Publishing comic series Infiltration (which is the awesome).

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The RPG situation has cooled to a simmer for the moment. Everyone’s pretty much got busy lately; us with renovations, Rhys’ mate Kev with work and Simon and Cristel juggling keeping the bills paid and four youngsters busy. So there’s been no more InSpectres since that last time. It looks as though Kev is heading off South; he’s keen on the idea of being able to manage an office of the sales business he’s working for, and that might take him south of the border.

Still, things are looking up again. I’m revisiting the idea of playing some Primetime Adventures online. Vickie’s interested, as are a couple of friends down South, so fingers crossed I’ll be able to tell you how that goes – and, frankly, I reckon it’ll go better than last time. I have a more concrete idea of how the Pitch session should go; put simply, everyone has to be keen on the show idea we come up with or else the game will crash and burn (as the last one did). I’ve been listening to the audio recordings of the “Life on Mars” sessions, which are pretty awesome examples of how PtA actually works, as well as the Sons of Kryos’ eighteenth podcast which features some hints and tips.

Continue reading "Simmering, But Almost Ready to Serve" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 07:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You thought Batman: Dead End was freaky? You ain't seen nothing yet. Check out the first chapter of IMPS: The Relentless, the sequel to TROOPS. The production values are... well, let's just say you'll be amazed what an entirely volunteer effort can come up with. The intro sequence alone looks like something the guys at Industrial Light & Magic whacked together when they had some excess rendering time on their hands.

The first chapter is a hair over 200 megabytes, though, so you may want to do an overnight download. But it's worth it. Why? 'Cos it's the sequel to TROOPS.

Which means funny.

(Mucho belated thanks to Gav for this, who burned Chapter 1 onto a CD-ROM for me.)

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Find out in The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, an hilarious paean to a youth saturated in Eighties pop-culture.

Yes, you are surrounded by Assholes.

(Thanks to the Wil to Power.)

Posted by IMAGinES at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The picture alone is worth it.

But if you've GMed a lot of RPGs, the context is even better.

Okay, so it's two more.

Three.

Yeah, four, five, and six.

And if you've ever, ever owned a dog: Seven.

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, one might've been enough for me, but it certainly wasn't for some people. Check these chuckle-worthy motivational lithographs out:

• Definitely the other way around for Vickie and I.
• Revenge is a dish best served ugly.
• Speaking of sex (or lack thereof)...
• Do I look like a John Woo character?
• Oh, the humanity.
• Just make sure you're not the dwarf.
• But what about sponge?
• Not as funny as the rest - but I love the spirit of it.
• Hey, Simon, you reading this?
• Some people live in it.
• And on the distaff side...
• Paging Mr. Howard, Mr. Robert E. Howard...
• One for you browncoats.
• And here's another.

UPDATE 25 May 06 5:00PM:

• Quit laughing so loud! I take my ego-boosters where I can get 'em!

Posted by IMAGinES at 05:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay, so there's this thread on RPGnet asking people to Photoshop their own RPG-related motivational poster. You know those motivational posters - ahem, sorry, lithographs, right? You've probably seen them at work, even if only in the overbearing, power-slogan-spouting boss' office. They've been sent up left, right and centre, and now it's the RPG crowd's turn.

Of course, I had to weigh in (thanks to a neat little tool found here) with one of my own.

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to Gav, who sent me an e-mail with this link this very day, IMAGinES is proud to link you to a (purported) CGI test reel made for the TransFormers film. Now, if rumour is correct, this reel was for a rejected bid.

So hopefully the computer generated TransFormers in the film (which is apparently due to start principal photography soonish) will somehow look even better.

Posted by IMAGinES at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With all of this RPG-related activity lately, it's about time I posted another PG-related Link of the Moment. Game Circle is a new web site dedicated to making connections between Australian players. The aim is to set up local "pools" of hobbyists who get together for short campaigns and are thus likely to stay in the pool, as opposed to Finding A Group and Never Coming Back.

The concept is based around substantial anecdotal evidence that the short, six-to-ten session campaign is much more common than the almost-mythical "One Campaign with One Group that Goes For Years" that Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk try to sell to adult hobbyists who have to juggle work and time commitments. I first came across the idea when RPGnet member Jim Bob presented it in this thread, and it seems like just the thing Simon and I have discussed in the past.

It's still aimed at the "alredy a gamer" crowd, and I'm seriously thinking about garnering interest among those who've never participated in a game before. Still, it'd be nice to establish a pool like that which gamecircle.org suggests. Fingers crossed we can get one going...

Posted by IMAGinES at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember a while back, I posted about the untimely and unfortunate death of Vincent Schiavelli? Well, thanks to Ben Stiller, he's left us a legacy easily worthy of his memory.

Or should that be the other way around?

Anyway, with thanks to SteveD for hipping his reading public to this, I highly recommend you watch Heat Vision and Jack, starring Jack Black, the Voice of Owen Wilson and Ron Silver as Himself.

You know, there must be some sort of secret vault of stuff that resulted after stars got their friends and industry contacts on a conference call and said, "Hey, guys, I'm feeling kinda loopy and have a spare coupla hundred grand burning a hole in my pocket. Wanna hook up and do stuff?" I mean, if Ben Stiller did, right?

Posted by IMAGinES at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've been browsing the Waves in the Black forums (for fans of the Serenity RPG) a bit this morning; as I wrote earlier, I've been contemplating a Serenity campaign for Vickie, Simon and Cristel. One of my favourite sub-forums of Waves in the Black is the Shipyards, where players post ship designs they've come up with. When I was last browsing it, a few had gone as far as firing up 3D design programs and done up some natty renders of their ships.

Sine that time, though, a few people have discovered a freeware rendering program called DoGA, and the number - and quality - of computer generated images has, if you'll pardon the pun, skyrocketed.

Continue reading "A Whole Gorram Saleyard" » </