webcomics
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!
Free comics!
This has been going for a while, but I only discovered it last week. Dark Horse comics have moved their old Dark Horse Presents series onto Myspace. I’m pretty sceptical of reading ‘normal’ comics (as opposed to strip style webcomics) on a screen, but the short 3-4 page format actually suits it pretty well.
All the Dark Horse favourites are there if you search through the back issues, including a Firefly comic, a few Buffy ones (some by Joss Whedon, some by Jane Espenson) and I think I saw a Dr. Horrible one too. There’s also some Hellboy ones and the very cool Mike Mignola comic ‘Witchfinder: Murderous Intent’ which is what got me here in the first place. Over all it’s well worth an explore and a good way to get some experience with a few different comics without having to shell out money for a trade paperback.
Running your game outside of the session
Gabe from the webcomic Penny Arcade blogged the other day about how his D&D 4e game runs outside of the weekly gaming session. The basic idea is that they continue small situations outside of the game, including skill challenges through a custom online dice roller.
Here’s the example of their emails. It’s pretty GM led, but there’s no reason why it has to be, and seems like a good way to keep the interest in the game high.
I’ve tried to do a few things simialr to this in the past and it’s dependent on player engagement (and, to be fair, player spare time). In my experience there are players who rock at this and people who won’t even bother to respond. Gabe’s lucky he’s got a good group who want to keep going. And of course, the GM is hugely responsible for the level of engagement they players have with the game. But I think it’s a dream of every GM to get players who just want to keep the game going, even between sessions.
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!
A new xkcd
I enjoy xkcd (except when it’s about physics and maths and then I’m just confused) and the most recent one really made me giggle. Check it out:
Voynich Manuscript
More Watchmen linkage
For someone who has forsworn the movie, Alan Moore sure is getting a lot of coverage out it! And he’s selling lots of comics too. Here’s some of the more interesting Watchmen links I’ve seen in the last couple of days:
Salon.com have run an interesting, intelligent interview with Moore (you’ll have to get a site pass) – he’s in pretty good form right now! Despite promising to ‘spit venom‘ all over the film last year, he’s been pretty even-handed in his discussions in the interviews he’s been doing.
The webcomic PvPonline has been running a Watchmen parody called The Ombudsmen (that’s part one of 5). It’s pretty funny, if you like PvP’s sense of humour, and uses characters from the newspaper comic pages to riff on the ideas in Watchmen.
Saturday Morning Watchmen is a flash movie about what Watchmen would have been like as an old school Saturday morning cartoon. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I will!
Finally, on slightly different note, is Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of the movie but also the comic, Alan Moore, his fans and comics in general (with a few black and white exceptions) and it’s safe to say he doesn’t like any of them. It’s an incredible exercise of missing the point and letting your pre-conceptions colour your published work. For example:
The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.
I haven’t seen the film (yet) but lots of reviews are leveling similar criticism at it – that it revels in the violence of the story. But as AVClub’s ‘Book vs. Film‘ feature on Watchmen points out, Moore doesn’t revel in the violence of the story. The violence in Watchmen isn’t supposed to be all ‘kick ass cool’. It’s supposed to show how de-humanised these people have become. Lots of readers have seemed to think that some of the more violent characters in the comic are pretty cool (much as skinheads adopted A Clockwork Orange) but Moore certainly doesn’t and the fact that Lane thinks he does demonstrates how poorly he understood not just Watchmen but Moore’s entire body of work. Best of all he basically says ‘of course the fans will disagree with me on this’ in his opening paragraph saying that
Fans of [comics] are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match.
Whatever dude – when you’re wrong you’re wrong and on this, you’re really wrong.