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How Wild do you like your Space (that got canceled)?

by Aaron Williams on March 15, 2019 at 6:36 PM
Posted In: Nostalgia!, Tabletop Gaming, The Internetonomicon

I found another hole in my gaming-geek lore trove I keep in my brain. Back in the 90’s, TSR produced a boardgame that included a VHS tape as a component and called the whole thing Dragonstrike. The intro video is about 30 minutes long and makes a lot of tongue-in-cheek fantasy movies being made today look professional by comparison. Still, it features some really amazing barbarian hair, so there’s that.

Anyway, VCR games did poorly, and so a lot of them got canceled even before getting to the prototype stage. One that did go so far as to make a trailer video was Wildspace, based on the D&D Spelljammer game setting. Basically, it was D&D in spaaaaaccce! I don’t think it contained as much bluescreen slapstick as was featured in this sample of what could have been:

Maybe we can get a revival of this project by the Black Mirror people? I mean, after what they did with Bandersnatch, this could be right up their alley.

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A Friday link-list of odd and unusual interests…

by Aaron Williams on March 8, 2019 at 11:56 AM
Posted In: It Came from the Internet, Nostalgia!, Om Nom Nom!, Science ahoy!, The Idiot Box

• Actor Luke Perry recently passed, and his most recent TV series, Riverdale is adding an “in memoriam” card. For me, his best role is still the titular one from an old Showtime series, Jeremiah. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend it as a far better take on the post-apoc genre than Jericho, though it’s only two seasons long… and the last part of season two is three unfilmed seasons worth of plot crammed into the smallest possible amount of time, but it’s still pretty good.

• Need a presentation or paper that sounds deep but is in reality total nonsense? Refresh this page for a new overlong simulation of most meeting agendas.

• Soon, your old Blockbuster Video card will be usable at only one location on planet Earth (Bend, Oregon), as the final one in Australia is set to close.

• I’m sure some mad scientist is out there working on improving this as a biological weapon for the DEA, as it appears parrots addicted to poppies are causing opium makers headaches. I’m kind of wondering if they start vocalizing more unusual things, apart from imitating the curses of the poppy farmers.

• An animator takes an unusual look at Seven Sunsets.

• Today I learned that Goodyear once created the “Inflatoplane”, but missed out on the military using it as the inflatable aircraft was decidedly vulnerable to bow and arrow anti-aircraft fire.

• Continuing my educational forays via the internet, my son asked me who invented the first snowman. While we’ll probably never know, the current record-holder for earliest documented depiction of a person constructed from frozen water crystals goes to an illustration from the Book of Hours, circa 1380.

• What can’t be brewed into beer these days? Lucky Charms cereal is no longer on that list.

• This is thoroughly useless but I’m glad it exists: Here’s an aptly named website called Endless Horse. Scroll to the hooves, if you can!

• Someone finally 3D printed the infamous D&D monster, The Dread Gazebo.

• Adding a little credence to all those sci-fi movies and games where technology still works after decades of disuse, a 30-year-old Apple IIe fired up flawlessly and befuddled the owner’s children.

• Because it’s a fun take on Breakout games as well as almost the name of a Mel Brooks movie, here’s Space-Ballz. Use gravity to pull back and fire your Space Ballz at incoming planets as well as recall your Ballz to fire them again. Unfortunately, pulling your Ballz in also pulls the planets closer…

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OK Go has a new version of an early hit.

by Aaron Williams on March 1, 2019 at 1:50 AM
Posted In: Mystery Clip Theater, You call that noise "music?"

“This Too Shall Pass” was originally a bit of a viral sensation with a fun Rube Goldberg music video that was later spoofed by the comedy duo The Umbilical Brothers and the Polyphonic Spree in “Raise Your Head” video. Anyway, OK Go has made a new version that features marching band instruments and ghillie suits:

So beware of roaming camouflaged band members on your nature hikes.

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Ken Nordine passed away, but I don’t remember him for the usual reason.

by Aaron Williams on February 18, 2019 at 11:00 PM
Posted In: Mystery Clip Theater, Nostalgia!

Ken Nordine’s iconic voice passed into history at the age of 98 last week. I wasn’t familiar with his “Word Jazz” creation, though I’m not surprised given the memories I have of hearing his vocal tones. While everyone else remembers him for his contributions to art, I remember him more as “that guy who did the voiceovers for those Levi’s jeans commercials that were like animated 1970’s airbrush paintings.” Here’s my favorite example:

If my working starship must be shaped like jeans, I’ll take it.

This next one features Ken and even more 70’s imagery that might remind you of old notebook covers if you went to school in the era of bell bottoms:

So farewell, Ken Nordine, from someone who misses you speaking over proto-CGI garments and garishly colored animations.

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A hand-animated Paper Mario.

by Aaron Williams on February 13, 2019 at 3:51 AM
Posted In: Mystery Clip Theater, Video Gaming

Here’s a short cutout-n-animated tribute to Super Mario Bros done on notebook paper:

Sorry, Luigi.

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Equivalent rewards and a lite linkdump…

by Aaron Williams on February 8, 2019 at 8:05 PM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, It's got Robots and Lasers, Om Nom Nom!, You call that noise "music?"

Apropos of nothing, I have the 7-11 app installed on my phone because I tend to use my refill mug often enough to make it worthwhile. I’ve been accumulating points towards some rewards, should I choose to cash them in, and I noticed something about two items on the 2,000 point level:

I’m not sure if that says something about how awesome that energy drink is or how unhealthy that pizza is.

Anyway:

• As I find my Steam library filling up with more indie games, this list of finalists for the 21st Independent Games Festival awards ceremony has some interesting titles to keep an eye on for the next game sale.

• In an unrelated search for Star Trek information, I ran across the CoverMe website with Five Good Covers of the Star Trek Theme Song.

• More evidence that perhaps Bethesda should make their next Fallout game in conjunction with LEGO in the form of BrickCon 2018 footage of a multi-level Fallout-themed vault and city.

• Arthurian completionists might want to check out a fragment of a Merlin tale found (rediscovered?) in an archive in Bristol. Merlin uses the spell “Banner Fire Breath” to make a dragon on a flag spit flames… like you do.

• British comedian Jeremy Hardy passed away recently, and the BBC Radio 4 show, “The News Quiz” will never be the same. I always loved it when he made former host Sandi Toksvig laugh uncontrollably as he did in this clip about “bright” children.

• I’m a sucker for video games with word puzzles, so here’s Elimination. Remove as few letters as possible to create a word for points. Use rarer letters for a higher score. Impress friends and win over lexicographers!

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The following is for archival purposes and probably won’t make sense to many reading it, including me.

by Aaron Williams on January 29, 2019 at 5:00 PM
Posted In: Nostalgia!, Science ahoy!, The Basement Storage Bin

My mother-in-law was recently going through a bunch of old papers and found one from her second husband’s time as a computer programmer-technician-guy for AT&T several decades ago. It appears to be an attempt at levity regarding computer terminology of a bygone age. I couldn’t find any trace of it on the internet, so I thought it was my duty to preserve this bit of geek heritage, hoping it might have some value to someone, somewhere, someday.

From what I gather, the word “AbEnd” refers to the term Abnormal End where a computer program unexpectedly terminates or crashes. I think these are either jokes or ways to remember what a given AbEnd’s cause is. Maybe. Anyway, here it is (spellings, capitalization and punctuation left intact):

ABEND JINGLES

Lets see, an 804
means you need more core.

And a D37, for your information,
means you need more secondary allocation.

While a B37, in the same vein and tradition,
means you need more primary allocation.

For an 806 the program is contrary;
You just need a steplib to the right library.

Also, a U0004 on LF356
just means the table needs to be fixed.

And then there’s always BB454
where a bad order causes an OC4.

Well an OC1 is really quite dumb;
It means a DD’s missing for someone.

And a 137, 237, 337, or 437
means your trailers aren’t going to heaven.

To ignore an 813 abend is insane
since header and DSN are not the same.

When a program with an OC7 goes kaputt
it means your really have bad input.

On TTRAN an abend of a U0031
means you must scratch data sets from MN0001.

When the job with a 213 has gone wrong,
it could mean a data set’s gone, gone, gone.

When the job with an 013 meets its demise,
you might check closely with the LRECL and BLKSIZE.

And thus a bit of computer advice in the form of kinda-sorta poetry is preserved for the ages. I have no clue about what any of these things specifically mean, and I wonder if I’m not feeling what others do when we rattle off trivia about game rules (including THAC0) to non-players. I think I still prefer the song “S100” by Frank Hayes, even though I don’t know anything about that, either.

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I can’t stop listening to this in horrified fascination…

by Aaron Williams on January 26, 2019 at 6:27 PM
Posted In: The Internetonomicon, You call that noise "music?"

I’m assuming everyone out there has heard Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” if not Weird Al’s version, “Smells Like Nirvana,” yes? Well, some evil genius remixed the original song to be in a major key:

It’s as if it’s trying to rewrite half of my brain’s experiences from the 90’s.

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Not a review of Star Trek Discovery, exactly, just a pet peeve…

by Aaron Williams on January 23, 2019 at 2:42 AM
Posted In: From the Mouth of Madness, It's got Robots and Lasers, The Idiot Box

I never did finish off my episode-by-episode review of Star Trek Discovery season 1, but the short version is: Had problems, watched anyway, still hopeful.

That said, the first episode of the second season irked me in a new and special way: It pretty much gave up all pretense of caring about whether or not the ship itself makes sense. Maybe this is just a little gripe, but I have a hard time thinking this was done by anyone who likes at least trying to make things semi-plausible for this show as opposed to hyper-exaggerating things via special effects just because they can.

A little background: Back in the old days of Star Trek, the turbolift was a future-elevator that could travel through tubes in different directions, changing from up-down to sideways as the ship’s plan allows. Here’s how it looked in one of the old tech manuals:

The lines in red mark where turboshafts were, roughly (I think one went to the shuttle bay, but we’ll let that slide). Anyway, you could see they were pretty straightforward, allowing transit in multiple directions to accommodate the layout of the ship. On the first episode of season two of Discovery, this is how the inner workings of the turbolifts looked:

I’d love to see how all that fits in the ship’s schematics. It’s literally a roller-coaster setup with the cars moving along those neon-colored minecart rails. It’s as if someone decided a roller coaster was integral to the vessel’s design, leaving next to no room for anything else.

And don’t get me started on Star Trek Beyond‘s Yorktown starbase, or I’ll have to be even more of a nerd curmudgeon. 🙂

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Spider-Man: Eurotrip?

by Aaron Williams on January 15, 2019 at 10:06 AM
Posted In: Cineplexia, Mystery Clip Theater

The trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home just dropped, and I can only assume we’re mostly seeing what happens in the first thirty minutes or so before a visit from an iconic character from the earliest days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe:

I really need to read up on Mysterio. I remember him as basically a prop magician that robbed banks, so apparently he’s upgraded his act.

I also can’t help but be reminded of the recent trailer for Men in Black International. Perhaps it’s just me, but both that film and the new Spider-Man footage make me think we’re seeing the results of directors and producers who spent a decent portion of their past watching Torchwood and Doctor Who.

Maybe?

Anyway, where’s Captain Britain?

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