Month: May 2016

So, looks like Mark Ruffalo’s gonna green up again.

Interestingly, he’s gonna be playing the Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok. Usual suspects for the main cast: also… “Other newcomers to the film include Jeff Goldblum as the eccentric Grandmaster, Tessa Thompson as the classic hero Valkyrie, and Karl Urban as Skurge.” And with Cate Blanchett as the Big Bad (Hela). That’s gonna be one long geek-fest from start to finish, in other words. Except for Tessa Thompson, who I don’t think has done geek movies before now.

…Apropos of nothing, a Thor / Hulk / Loki / Stacker Pentecost / Van Helsing / Galadriel / Dr. McCoy / Pick The Scientist Jeff Goldblum Will Be Playing movie would be AMAZINGLY good.  And I even know how to make it work.  My pitch? Real simple: LEGO Movie 2.

Interesting: India’s done a successful reusable spaceship test.

Always nice to see a country actually have an actual space program*.

In the early hours of Monday morning, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully launched its first “Re-usable Launch Vehicle,” which at full-size will be able to lift satellites into orbit.

Scientists launched the unmanned model to a peak altitude of 65 km (40 miles) before turning it around for a controlled descent into the Bay of Bengal. The total flight lasted about 13 minutes.

Continue reading Interesting: India’s done a successful reusable spaceship test.

Interesting article on using GUMSHOE in D&D.

Interesting discussion here on how to incorporate GUMSHOE’s investigative …sorry, but ‘paradigm’ really does seem to be the best word to use – into a D&D game.  Basically, the idea behind GUMSHOE is that you don’t need to roll dice to get a vital clue: you just have to have the relevant investigative skill. It’s explicitly designed to avoid a situation where the GM and PCs are left staring at each other helplessly because nobody made a critical skill roll, thus causing the adventure to freeze up until the GM finds some way to justify giving his players a relevant clue. It happens to everybody, so it’s nice to have a system that eliminates the problem.

The only quibble I have about porting the idea over to a game like D&D is this: one of the things that GUMSHOE also does is make sure that a party has at least one player who has all the investigative skills. This requires a certain amount of coordination between the PCs, not to mention everybody seeing everybody else’s character sheets. Some campaigns may not be so cool about that sort of thing.

Still, the idea of porting into your game a system that’s designed explicitly to let you run investigative scenarios is definitely something to consider…

HEY! PEOPLE! “Cast A Deadly Spell” is available on Amazon Video!

Free with Prime membership! Not on Netflix! Alas, Witch Hunt is not available on either, but this is still awesome news. Cast a Deadly Spell is an HBO Film set in a postwar 1940s California where magic works and Phil Lovecraft (no relation) is a private detective. If you have not seen this movie – and I’ve raved about it before – then give yourself permission to go and watch it. It’s far too good to be so inexplicably not available on DVD.

Unhappy Bizarro Hallowene!

This is why we have the Internet, honestly. Because you didn’t know that today was Bizarro Halloween. And yet, somehow, knowing this – and that it’s celebrated with Mickey Mantle masks – makes things just a little bit better.

Snippet: Zombie Lawn Gnomes

Welp. This is… this is stuff that I used to do more often. Blame this.

Zombie Lawn Gnomes

As apocalyptic entities go, these things are… disturbing and sanity-eroding, but they’re not exactly dangerous. Zombie Lawn Gnomes (people are still trying to figure out how to shorten that name properly) look like… well, they look like plaster or resin lawn gnomes that have been zombified. Eroded and greyish skin, visible bones, arms straight out… classic stuff, really. And yes, they move around in order to find their prey, which are… other lawn gnomes. Or small statuary. They’ll chomp on a terra cotta planter if there are no other options, but: it’s strictly ceramic with these guys. If you’re made out of meat or metal, they don’t care about you at all. Needless to say: any statuary that gets bitten by a Zombie Lawn Gnomes will transform into one itself; a human that gets bitten by one… apparently will only have that happen by accident, and there’s absolutely no long-term effect at all. Aside from getting a cut from something ceramic, of course.

The governments of the world, of course, would be heavily engaged of course in suppressing the knowledge of even the existence of Zombie Lawn Gnomes (assuming that the governments of the world actually can). Why ‘of course?’ …Because whatever Zombie Lawn Gnomes are, they are clearly Something Different. Zombie Lawn Gnomes should not exist in orderly, sensible universes. It doesn’t matter if they’re supernatural, esoteric, demonic, occult, or filled with nanobots (which is our generation’s way of saying ‘supernatural, esoteric, demonic, and/or occult,’); think about them too long, and some people freak out. And it’s the Lovecraft-style cosmic-terror style freak out, too. It’s like the things are designed to put over the edge all the people inclined to write down just how scared they are of the eldritch monstrosity that’s about to eat their spleen. And for all anybody knows… Zombie Lawn Gnomes are.

Oh, and how do you kill one? …You pick it up and drop it on the sidewalk? Kinetic energy seems to work pretty well with Zombie Lawn Gnomes, although I’d recommend against shooting them. It’d be pretty embarrassing to get shot by somebody who ricocheted a bullet off of a shambling ceramic zombie menacing a tomato planter…