links
Need a 1920’s character photo?
I had a GM a while back who required us to all get photos for our characters. It wasn’t something I’d done before and I’m not sure we really used them much but I thought it was a decent idea.
Today I found (via Very Short List) this cool flickr set of 1920’s passport photos. They’re of famous people but they’re largely not recognisable (and not all of them are still famous). Perfect for a Pulp game or some 20’s Call of Cthulhu.
Linky linky linky linky LINKS
Sorry for last week’s lack of links and apologies in advance for the lack of links next week!
- Mark Charan Newton thinks sci-fi books are dying. I tend to agree.
- Why fandom owes even more to H.P. Lovecraft than we realised.
- A man has ‘beaten’ WoW. Sort of (via Boing Boing)
- Dollhouse battles were about sex. So says Whedon – Fox will never tell.
- Real life vampire killing kits!
- Using Microsoft’s Surface to play D&D – more footage.
Links? On a Thursday?
Who would have thunk it?
- Charles Stross writes on the issues to do with spaceships.
- Lev Grossman chooses his top 5 fantasy books of all time! (via i09.com)
- Something Awful dissects the art of Traveller.
- Paizo are having another of their RPG Superstar design competitions.
I think the internet is playing Dragon Age too…
It’s Thursday. Want some links?
- I personally don’t especially care about covers – I choose books based on reviews and previous work and I think most SFF covers are rubbish. But some people care a great deal. Here’s a post at A Dribble of Ink about the changes between editions of Mark Charan Newton’s Nights of Villjamur. The comments are pretty interesting if you like that sort of thing, with all sorts weighing in, including Newton’s editor.
- Filming of the Games of Thrones pilot has wrapped. Now we wait to see what the chances of a actual series are.
- Sex advice from D&D players. Actually serious advice, not a parody.
- The AV club’s best 15 video games of the noughties.
- Next time you’re at a loss for PC or NPC, try looking up this print of Characters for an Epic Tale. (via Boing Boing)
- The BBC discusses committing war crimes in video games. (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
- The Times covers ‘adult gamers’. Shock, horror!
- And, finally, Kotaku celebrates World of Warcraft’s 5th birthday by finding out from people why they’ve never played it. The intro where the writer discusses how it just doesn’t live up to tabletop gaming experiences is the most interesting one to me.
Yet another THURSDAY LINK DAY!!!
- More DMing advice from Penny Arcade
- The movie Gattaca is being made into a sci-fi, police procedural TV show. Sound pretty cool!
- How we’ll cope (or not) with the Dollhouse cancellation – the 5 Stages of Grief. But, maybe we’ll get more Buffy?
- Setting up your Mac to play PC games.
- Michael Chabon on breaking out of genre and the role of fan-fiction in popular culture.
- What Stormtroopers do on their day off.
- Some guy at the Guardian reads George R. R. Martin for the first time.
- Robin D. Laws does a great real world RPG inspiration. Maybe we should change the way we do ours?
- i09’s take on what SFF books you might like if you liked some recent movies. It’s a cool idea, done well and the recommend some great books!
- Finally, The Onion A.V. Club gives us more geek fun with their New Cult Canon write up on Army of Darkness, a movie I have never seen but now really want to!
Thursday LINK DAY!!!
- Does your barbarian or dwarf warrior need a more interesting weapon? Try this out.
- What war is really like.
- Rising star Mark Charan Newton interviews established tie-in writer Dan Abnett about writing tie-in fiction. I’ve you’ve never read Eisenhorn you should – it maybe a Warhammer 40k book but it’s also excellent! And very cheap now it’s in a omnibus format.
- How we write about the Apocalypse has changed in the last 20 years. And here’s an interesting piece about how Sci-Fi looked at the Cold War. (Both from io9.com which is now on my RSS reader)
- The Brainy Gamer get into why Dragon Age is filled with “RPG things”.
- Bioware on what they’ve learned from Bethesda.
- The AV Club keep up the good work with the latest Gateways to Geekery on Philip K. Dick.
- And, finally, The Times online has 70 facts you didn’t know about Marvel Comics in honour of Marvel’s 70th birthday. There’s a bunch of other articles there too.
Thursday Link Day
I’m going to try to do the links on Thursdays from now on. I’ve got some niiiice ones today!
- Holy crap – Planescape: Torment is getting a re-release! Best CRPG EVER. This will work properly on Vista and Windows 7 apparently so it will work nicely for the new PC… (thanks to the Wertzone – no idea how I missed this on my RPS feed)
- Boing Boing has a piece on using Google Wave as a chat channel for RPGs. I guess, but it won’t replace the table top for me.
- Boardgame News has a great article running down card games and boardgames that have been released using the whole Cthulhu/Lovecraft mythos – great, good, average and bad. I really want to play some Arkham Horror.
- And finally, here’s a report about the Essen Game Fair by a guy from local shop Paradigm Infinitum.
And some TV and movie links
Just a couple of interesting news items:
- Apparently Dollhouse has been put on a brief hiatus due to the upcoming sweeps week. Hopefully the fact that its DVR ratings have been huge means that it will finish up the season – at least.
- An Iain M. Banks story has been picked up to be made into a film! Bank’s short story ‘A gift from the Culture’ from the collection The State of The Art is apparently going to be made into a film. More here and here (tip from A Dribble of Ink). No word on timing or anything else. I’ve read the story but can’t remember a thing about it and I think the book is on my parents shelf half a world away. Anyone else remember much?
Links? Me?
I’m still trying to get a game together over here so I don’t have any RPG writing to do, but in the meantime – here’s some links!
- The RZA talks about being a geek – comics, technology and letting his kids play videogames for 4 hours a day.
- The webcomic XKCD gets animated.
In other nerdy news, I now have an HD TV and boy does my 360 look good!
Some video game links
I’ve been collecting links but had no time to post them. So here you go!
- Regular readers know that Sophie and I are pretty excited about upcoming PC/console RPG Dragon Age and may have even picked up that we’re both planning on playing it on the Xbox 360. Good news for us then because the Kotaku writers have had some time with the 360 version and say the controls work fine!
- There was also an interesting interview with video game designer Tim Schafer about the need for games to expand their subject matter beyond sci-fi and fantasy if the medium is going to grow larger. I could give a fuck about it getting bigger, but he’s probably not wrong.
- Finally, magicians Penn & Teller have dedicated an episode of their show Bullshit! to violent video games – pretty funny stuff.
I need to read a video game blog other than Kotaku. Any suggestions?
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