Its good to see that Martin is interested in Travian. All told it was a cool game, but sadly it seems I’ll probably have to bow out. I had a good weekend. Meaning I wasn’t attacked once. But this morning Nataly, a nearby player and stand up jacktard started coming on strong again and torched my Granary, Main Building and City Walls. Background, she does this daily. As long as the raid against me brings back no resources, I lose my Main Building, Barracks, City Walls, and Merchant. I’m not sure why the Granary felt her wrath today, it might have been a typo sort of thing, or she could have her catapults set to random to try and ferret out my man crannies. This will be even funnier later. I’ll get to that. However as I type this I’ve got another attack incoming. There really isn’t anything to do about it, her alliance is dedicated to (and I quote) “bring Chaos and Death to this server and WåR is what we will wage” so there isn’t much to be said to them.

I like Dragonforce as much as the next guy, but that’s a bit obscene.

So I figure I court the Good Ending. There was a post on the Escapist recently where a guy “went out in style” from World of Warcraft by logging on each of his characters, getting them to a heroic death, then deleting them. I figure the Travian equivalent is doable. There’s no point in fighting militarily (She has four villages with a combined pop over over 1400), therefore I should invite complete annihilation rather than slow death of a thousand cuts. I sent her a message recently, I’ll reproduce it here (The subject was “Love is All You Need”)

Dearest Nataly,

I was beginning to think you had forgotten about me. I lay awake at night over the weekend, tossing and turning. My mind aflame with questions. Had you found another? Was the passion between us cold? And then this morning like a beacon from above came your answer: your love for me burned as brightly as my now destroyed Main Building! I was elated!

Which is why this hurts so much. I am sad to say that our love can never be. We are too different, you and I. Perhaps if you could wax your upper lip, and I could break my arranged marriage to the heiress of the local cog and dial conglomerate, but no, that way lies madness. Besides, if I was to take you away from your love of peanut butter and your neighbor’s dog, it would surely kill you as quickly as my jilted bride’s family.

I ask only that you think of me as you lie sweating beneath that panting schnauzer or while you relentlessly satisfy each member of your thousand-man army (and their horses) like Catherine the Great on mescaline in Secretariat’s stable. And know, that secretly in my heart, my passion for you will always smolder as hotly as the ruin of my Granary and City Walls.

With Love always,
Ninjasuperspy

XXXOOOXXX

That was diplomatic enough I think. I only accused her of bestiality three times. And I couldn’t remember if you capitalized mescaline. If she doesn’t cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war after that (or try to get me banned) then I’ll have to resort to my secret weapon: Limericks about her tits. Women love those.

Though I secretly think “she’s” covertly a guy engaging in that time honored tradition of pretending to be a girl on the internet in order to get fewer people to attack her until she’s in the catbird seat. Not that women can’t be duplicitous curs. Ever since Jenny McCarthy made farting in the MTV Beach House the Funniest Thing Ever back in ‘94 the state of women has been in sharp decline.

Hilariously, I managed to get an actual response to my uproariously conceived little diatribe. It went a little something like this:

Nataly gets all the love she needs, and even more, from me - her husband and from our child. So don’t worry about that. And its me who will destroy you. I thought you could serve as a farm once daily and let you develop further, as we treat all around us. But since you are totally useless, you will just be erased. You should know by now that crannies DO attract catapults. So, just stick to WoW and don’t even try to play games like that, it requires more than just button pressing.

PS: I even can’t be bothered to read your screed. Cry more

Which is great really. I mean that’s just comedy gold. I’ve got all the righteous indignation there I could ever want. And the “you will just be erased” bit is great. I mean I can’t figure out what is best about that response: the Internet Toughguy attitude or the inference that I was a resource node (and should be proud of my status as not “useless”). I also liked the part where he/she/they said that I would (generously) be allowed to “develop further.” This being the code for “I level your main building daily.” Though the bit about WoW being “just button pressing” is precious in and of itself. Yeah, I named my village Duskwood and I do play WoW. What’s Travian though? Not button pressing? I mean is the point that Travian is somehow inherently superior to World of Warcraft because the buttons are pressed slowly? Or is this guy playing Travian on some kind of computer covered in switches or knobs? I don’t think we will ever know. In closing, I shot this one his way:

My love, my light,
Why must imaginary Romans feel the brunt of your unquenchable passion? Its fires have melted the ice of my steely resolve, and like you I will let passion be my guide! The life with my gear heiress is now a fleeting dream, and I live only for you, my dear.

Together we can build a life of wild insouciant pleasure, each night more exquisite than the last! You can even bring the dog, I am sure there will be times when I am too sober to see to your insatiable needs.

Yours forever and always,
Ninjasuperspy
XXXOOOXXX

PS. Remember always, light of my thighs, Travian is Serious Business.

So yeah. Travian is over for me. I might have rerolled as a Gaul or something, their efficient defense is compelling. But really, what would stop a local Teuton from stomping me into the ground? Nothing, that’s what. I’m really interested in how this plays out for Martin, just to see if there is a way for this overall experience to be positive. Though it could be classified as a worthwhile simulation of history: the little guy existed only as the bitch for the big guy. Bar none. In the grim reality of the fictitious past, there is only war. That sort of thing.

Meanwhile, back to button pushing! Wheee!

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So not much has been up the last few days. My mom tells me that my granddad is in the hospital though so I’d like to break with tradition here (babbling about video games and movies) and say a few works about him.

When it comes to relatives my grandad is a standout when it comes to my respect for him. From the fighting Nazis in WWII to racing cars the guy is a badass. Even recently when he can out bowl me with one leg (not too hard as I tend to bowl in the mid-teens) to taking computer classes and buying his own rig, the guy rocks. He reads this webpage for God’s sake, I can’t point to many other people related to me or not who do that.

Other than inverviewing him for school projects and talking to him at my cousin’s wedding I haven’t kept in touch as much as I’d like, and I’m being honest when I say that.

So yeah, this Mackeson’s is for you Douglas Carrico.

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OK. So i saw what the cool kids are calling LXG a few weeks ago. More like a month, really. I’ve been wrestling with this beast of a review since then. I’m a fairly large Alan Moore fan. I think From Hell was a good story (with quite enough Victorian London T+A and penis slang, thank you) that was murdered by Johnny Depp and company. “Top 10″ is probably one of my favorite graphic novel series. I think that “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” is a breakthrough concept that looks at traditional literary figures in a way that is fresh and the antithesis of hidebond, while at the same time preserving their characters. League is incredible, and i await the arrival of the Volume 2 graphic novel with severely baited breath.

Needless to say i left the movie theatre feeling very cheated. The movie was godawful drek, and i can’t say as Moore was anywhere near the production. If he was it was probably for the purposes of extracting information via torture. Seeing your work ripped apart like that would be about like watching somebody shoot your dog, i think.

Yeah, i’m a little bit unimpressed.

See, everything stems from the fact that whoever is doing writing (outline drafts) for Hollywood has fastened on to a mad lib for writing comic book movies. It goes something like this:

1. Go to comic store.
2. Spin around 25 times with one hand out.
3. Whatever your hand is pointing at, buy.
4. If this is not a comic book, then purchase the person’s life story, streatch everything wildly out of proportion, and write “Coyote Ugly 2: The Ugly Stick”
5. If you are pointing at a comic, don’t bother to buy it. Just read the first few pages, and make a photocopy of a cast shot
6. Start writing your script. Here’s the outline: All cast members meet for the first time and start fighting crime. They will fight the first villian in the series.

I am getting pleanty tired of this formula, and in the case of League, it makes no damn sence. I mean if you don’t know who the Invisible (fucking) Man is, go back and finish Middle School you ignorant slope-browed troglodyte. The process of turning a 192 page book into a two hour movie should be entirely too easy. But hey, they had to first remove anything that made the series intelligent, add pleanty of stupidity, then showcase it with the most wretched action choreography that i’ve seen in years.

Lets start at the top. First off we can pretty well tell that Connery is one of the film’s producers. There was a little change from the comic… Quartermain is an opium addict whose particular inner demon is an extreme attraction to apotecary shops. Actually while guarding Mina (dressed as a hooker to draw out Hyde in Paris) he nips off for some juice of the poppy, drawing some pretty angry notes on his personell review. Also he seems to have been elevated to Team Leader. No way that they’d let Mina lead the group. I’d hate to think this was somehow related to her stance in the comic as an independant, divorced woman. This is the 21st century, after all.

Mina, Mina, Mina. How can you go from a badass in the comic to some insane Buffy reject so damn quickly. See in the book she never even mentions the D-word (Or the V-word at that). But ten minutes into the damn movie she’s all “Oh, and i’m the wife of Jonathan Harker, we fought Dracula and now i’m a Vampire.” I detest how idiots need major literary figures to wax into a silliloquy about their backstories in order to understand who they are. In the book she’s an independant woman who never takes off a scarf after “some business involving an Eastern European man.” In the movie she’s bereft of her leader role so of course she has to be the brain. I mean she is a woman after all. No reason to think that Captain Fucking Nemo, the inventor of the submarine, automobile, wireless telegraph, homing torpedo, and radar could tell what commonly used photographers chemicals are. No, we need a damn VAMPIRE with a chemistry set to perform the Time Honored Scientific Experiment (mixing two things in order to produce a colour change and fizz) to determine what flash powder is.

Nemo doesn’t have much of a role. Of course he leaves his sub all the damn time so there is that. Oh, and for some reason he, as a Hindu, knows tons of Kung Fu.

The Invisible Man is, amusingly enough, not there at all. See in the comic there was a series of “Immaculate Conceptions” at a convent in Britain and thereby the Man was tracked and dragooned into the League. In the movie… well, some random Cockney just took the formula. Isn’t that interesting. *Yawn*

Then there’s the travesty of Hyde smiling. Edward (damned) Hyde. The personification of everything evil about Jekyll learning to care about people. Hyde is no more capable of empathy and caring for his fellow being than any serial murderer. It should come as no surprise that i find Moore’s cannibalistic, venal mutant a lot more interesting and a good source of team friction (”How the hell am i supposed to work with this guy, he just tore someone in half and ate him!).

The two new characters are alright, i suppose. Sawyer is pretty cool, what with being the quintissential American. Brazen, twangy accent, has never seen a car before but is one hell of a stunt driver, shoots akimbo. If there was a Moore version of Sawyer, this is it. Remove the absurd Quartermain’s son subplot and you’ve got yourself a character. Dorian Gray is ok as well. Foppish, rude, very much an indolent british foil to these men (and female) of action.

There are two (count ‘em, two) dencent bits in this movie. Quatermain is taking automatic weapons fire in his lounge in Kenya and some other brit says “Automatic weapons? How unsporting!” To which he replys “They’re probably Belgian.” That was pretty pithy, and not altlgether uncool. The duel between the immortals started off really nicely. The witticisms before and after were more than badass.

The duels themselves are a huge dissapointment. I’m not trying to sound racist, but white people doing action choreography make me physically ill. It’s called a wide shot you idiot, learn how to use it. I’d love to see both people involved in a fight once in a while. Its a bit better than the Ridley Scott Jerky Cam that the entire Moriarty/Quartermain duel is shot in. I swear the camera spends all of its time looking at Sean Connery’s armpit, and for a while there i wasn’t even sure what the hell they were duelling with. Swords? Knives? Pipes? Fish? Who the hell knows, its just blurs on screen with some clanging sounds attached. I could get more enjoyment out of closing my damn eyes than actually watching that fight scene.

This doesn’t really help the movie. OK, so they find the big secret arms factory at the end: under production is a set of Nautiluses and big crazy tanks. That’s enough to worry any circa 1900 armed force, right? Well, armies of europe and abroad, no need to fret! The idiot designing the crap managed to build a factory in the middle of fucking mongolia. It is more than a day of dogsledding to the nearest river. See, if you are building an exact copy of a sub the size of an aircraft carrier, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the sub itself could, i don’t know, navigate all the way to your sub pen? And if there’s one thing that tanks love then it is being built on the top of a damn mountain in the middle of a snowstorm. I’d love to see him move an armoured division down the Himalayas during a blizzard. I think that would be very entertaining.

And its that type of crap that ruins the movie for me. You have an amazing concept for a team, all based on widely known figures and you have to completely mess it up with a Greatest Hits, everybody stands up and introduces themselves, here’s our first mission pile of garbage. My problems with Mina and Quartermain would be solved by setting this as Volume 3 and putting Mina’s translation into a full-blooded (haha) turning-into-bats vampire as a “coming out” metaphor. Quartermain would be coming to terms with his dead son in a way that doesn’t involve heavy drug use, basically a twelve-step program for weary british adventurers. Invisible Man and Hyde would be saved by an R rating and behaviour like their literary namesakes. I want a completely venal Invisible, and a totally brutal Hyde, is that too much to ask? Nemo takes care of himself, as once he’s Team Brain again he’ll have a role rather than just being an indian face on a submarine.

In closing, they didn’t have much the needed to adapt. Less than 200 pages. And if you cut title pages, expository mastheads, and one-page spreads then you probably have less than 180. Add to that the fact that you are introducing characters that are over 100 years old, and are iconic parts of literature and you don’t have to spend any time on intros. Just launch into an adventure, have fun with it, and try to create something that is just a bit less bland and stupid.

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So i’ve decided on a two-pronged purpose for this little area. I’d like to make it the “Brooks babbles about Resident Evil/survival horror” area, as well as the big secret ma-bob. Which, if you haven’t already figured it out, is very related to Resident Evil. You see i found an inexpensive Tokyo Mauri M-92 Samurai Edge airsoft, and i figured that it would make a pretty kickass blank slate for customization. And if that doesn’t sound very interesting, well you can come for the babbling about zombies and so forth.

But as it stands, i’ve got one Biohazard Edition pistol. At the moment, it isn’t mostly metal, but that is soon to change. What i’d like to do is put one order in when i get paid next week and get a more accurate inner barrel (accuracy), a metal outer barrel(looks killer), a more powerful valve (more power) and a stronger spring (bigger kick). After that we’re probably looking at laser sights, silencers and whatnot. You know, just fun stuff like that. It’ll be a good time killer while i’m waiting for my copy of Red Hat to download.

(Read the article)

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I have now officially ordered and recieved confirmation on the shipping of what will be the baseline for this little project. It should provide me with a few month’s of diversion and something really kickass at the end. Hopefully i’ll be able to get a digital camera and be able to make a decent enough how-to for people attempting to follow in my footsteps. Though i hope there aren’t that many as it would truely ruin the uniqueness.

Yes, i am being rather cloak and dagger about this whole thing. I think that’s my prerogative, and i find i rather enjoy being something of a tease.

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Yes, that is sarcasm. Apparently a Redhat install costs $150 in the store, something i had not anticipated. On top of that, their iso images for download seem to take about 48 hours a pop. And this isn’t on a wussy-ass dialup account either, this is on broadband. With six cd’s to download, i’m just not in the mood to wait that long. So if anybody has a decent reccomendation and/or CD’s to install said OS, i’d be more than happy to field try it out.

Until i can get an OS, the project is effectively stalled where it is. However it is beginning to look like i may need to remove and re-seat the motherboard, and this is actually a good thing. It will give me the excuse i need to dissassemble and photograph the steps i’ve taken to build this thing up. I’ve got a few interesting directions i’d like to take this thing, and they either entail selling what i have now and rebuilding the whole thing, or putting a number of band-aids on the many problems the box has (processors and 4 gb hard drive limit are the two big ‘uns). I may just overcome the size limit and get some OverDrive processors then work on the Linux thing from there. You never know what eBay may have for me.

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There we go, i’ve got the Geiger in the 5.25″ bay, and a hard drive sitting behind it all nice and sweet, and the drive in question is behaving quite nicely. It has fdisked and formatted just like a hard drive should, and i’m able to command prompt into the drive and take a look at what’s going on. I’m waiting now to find an operating system that’ll let me develop a knowledge of non-MS OS’s, but won’t be daunting as all hell. Yes, i’d like to start with a command line and move my way up to a GUI, thank you very much. I still use DOS, and i like knowing what my pretty pictures are actually doing underneath the covers so to speak.

In the meanwhile i’ve been playing star control 2. Lord i love that game.

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Finally i’ve gotten the thing to recognise a floppy, and i have to say i’ve never felt a sence of accomplishment this great. The fact that the company that makes the board is very out of business and the support documentation is almost non-existant, i think i’ve proven my expertise. Now that i’m done patting myself on the back, i think i’ll treat myself to that PC Geiger i was wanting back when i started this project. The fact that this case doesn’t seem to have any interior drive bays makes the Geiger a good choice, at it will make quite the drive faceplate.

This of course leads me to flashing the blazes out of the BIOS, as it currently has Revision 1, and Diamond hosts three revisions above that one. Revs 2 and 3 jump on with no problem, but 4 says its DMI chain is too large. This is a minor annoyance, as with the installation of revision 3 it now recognises the second processor, and all is well.

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So you’re playing Breath of Fire 3 (As i was, until i found out that i had completely neglected the Masters System until level 20 and had ostensibly wasted 20 levels of experience gathering. I’ll be starting over once i’m bored to tears), and you’ve just gotten Momo, the kickass bunny-chick with the bazooka and robot (we immediately know who’s my favorite. She’s cute, she has a robot, and is packing a bazooka. What am i made of, stone?) and of course you gleefully pack her into the party. First battle she strides confidently out, draws her huge cast-iron bazooka, and lets fly with a volley of (undoubtedly) kickass ammo… hitting nothing. Its ok, i bet everybody misses sometimes, right? Wrong. She misses again. And again. And again. And you get the idea. She can’t hit anything. Rampaging mammoths go unchecked and there’s nothing she can do about it. She becomes a second tier magic user, right next to the 5 year old princess. *Sigh* Another brilliant character wasted because of inability to use her own weapon… but wait! In the dump you uncover an item. Artemis’ Cap, a piece of headwear that is supposed to “Raise to-hit chance” and appears to be exactly Momo’s prescription strength. She starts being able to hit things. Then all of a sudden she’s a useful character again, and its about time. Now where the hell is that little purple-haired bastard that we’re looking for…

So Artemis’ Cap gets 5 stars. It honestly changed how i played an entire character, and thereby an entire game. For the few hours i used it, it was undoubtedly the most useful item i had heretofore uncovered that didn’t radically change one of my main characters forms.

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And here we have a fairly interesting and fairly enjoyable “jump out and spook you” horror movie. I did like alot of it. The Book of Evil is probably the best tome i’ve seen since the Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The actors themselves are well-chosen for their roles (more or less. As the children are fairly good saccarine children, the black chick is a fairly good sassy black chick, that guy who reminds me of Boone is a fairly accurate representation of Boone, etc). The ghosts are fairly creepy archetypes, and the house itself is creepy. “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” You ask… well, it has a drinking problem, and it beats me (but only because it loves me).

Whatever else it is, at its core Thirteen Ghosts is Scooby Doo. Think about it. Tony Shaloub is Fred, the black chick is Daphne, Boone is Shaggy, the Spritual Reclaimation person is Velma, and the kid who is always getting himself lost is Scooby. Boone is constantly trying to run away from the titular Ghosts, and Tony Shaloub ignores the creepiness of the house and of his uncle, then suggests that the group split up in an undead filled basement, getting half of the group trapped. Not in a net, mind you, but damn close.

There are a few (glaring) (annoying) issues with the movie. Half the ghosts don’t do anything. Not that i’m expecting a brace of showtunes from the Torso, or some improvizational dance on the part of the Great Child, but we only really have contact with the Withered Lover, the Juggernaut, the Hammer, the Torn Prince, the Jackal, and the Angry Princess. This leaves the Torso (which twitches), the Bound Woman (Who giggles and jerks), the Dire Mother/Great Child (who sits in a chair), the Firstborn Son (Who stands in one place), the Pilgrim (who i didn’t even remember until i checked the webpage a second ago), and another which honestly slips my mind at the moment, though i guess the Great Child and the Dire Mother count as two. So yeah, they are kinda creepy in a Tool video sort of way, but they lack a certain something.

For example, the amorphous Evil in the Evil Dead were creepy because of the Lovecraftian overwhelmingness of faceless evil, while these have to be 12 certain and “personal” horrors. This misses because of one incorrect confluence of scenes. There is a “Spiritual Reclaimation Expert” who shows up to set the ghosts free, and she brings the Tome of Evil with her (along with a healthy amount of the exposition), and tells us all about the Black Zodiac and its 13 symbol-spirits which infest the house. Then the Boone-esque guy has a seizure and tells us that the ghosts were “Hand-picked” and specifically designated to be the 12 of 13 in the house. Then they go off on a tangent and never explain who the ghosts are, why they are handpicked, and what they are doing in the house. This makes the ghosts only scary when they are doing anything, rather than adding any dimension of creeping horror. (The movie becomes more of a “AH! Look, he’s got a bat or something, and he’s a ghost so that’s scary!” rather than “Holy god look at that basement, i hope something doesn’t come out of nowhere, like that one half bloody serial killer who used to wait in ambush for people when he was alive… AH!”)

Other than that it was a really solid little three star movie. Really middle of the road, and i got exactly what i was expecting when i went in. Atleast i thought so until i talked to someone who had seen the original in theatres. Apparently the audience was given 3d glasses with the flick. The actual actors weren’t in 3d, but the Ghosts were. The ghosts and only the ghosts, and if you took the glasses off, you didn’t see anything. I can honestly say i have no idea how that was done (Research commencing… now). But it sounds very cool. There is only one way to redeem this… a killer dvd, and i know exactly how to do it. Packaging. I’m sure everone has seen the Basic Instinct DVD. Ice clear packaging with an icepick pen jammed in it makes it instantly recognizable, even to someone who was bored to tears by the film and wants badly to forget its existance. Here’s how we package the 13 Ghosts DVD. Clear plastic slipcover with only the title of the movie in embossed ink on the cover. The slipcase slides off to reveal a smaller mock-up of the Tome of Evil from the movie. The Tome is actually a book with some parchment-filled pages of runes, the Black Zodiac, and the House’s floorplan. The last few pages are hollowed out as in the movie to house the DVD, where the Tome was hollowed in the flick to hold spells on reel-to-reel. I actually think its one of my better ideas, and i may grab a dvd case and some parchment, make a mockup, and send it to the film people to see if they’d like it. Here’s hoping they wouldn’t screw me like Sony screwed that Aibo Guy.

So 3 stars. If you remind me of the presentation of the original, 2 1/2 or even 2 depending on how i’m feeling about originality.

And who has more acting credits than anyone but F. Murray Abraham? C. Ernst Harth. The Great Child, an obvious typecast

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