DoomBook

To wit, sandbags.

Building materials, as you may (or may not) have noticed, are expensive. Really expensive. So how do you throw up a small structure on that spare plot of land you’re eyeballing because it’s really cheap and somewhere convenient?

Exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. You can get a decent plot of land anywhere on the cheap, but what to put on it to make it a bit more useful as a stopover destination.. there’s the rub.

Even without running water or electricity a campsite style layover’s not bad. But I always liked a cabin over a tent.

It appears there are a few options. Sandbags can be used to make a reliable structure (makes sense, they work for instant dams). Although to be honest those places look all together a bit too crunchy for my taste.

An outfit out of Africa intends to make a system for putting up a sandbag based structure that looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, their website doesn’t leave me with any indication on their status as a real company.

To get a better idea, this page on Sandbag shelter prototypes (mostly for disaster relief) contains video and picture documentaries of various implementations around the world. These folks also have some nicer looking structures than some of the other sites I ran into.

Since I seem to be hung up on Last.FM lately..

Last just can’t seem to keep up with my musical preference. If you’ll look over to the right, most of the entries are grayed out. It can’t figure out what I’m listening to.

Is it really that hard to see “6Zeromancer_-_Stop_The_Noise” and parse that down to Zeromancer or 6Zeromancer (we’ll assume the former, if you did a cross reference for validity) track called “Stop the Noise”.

C’mon. Cut us a bit of programming here.

So does anyone else actually care about D&D 4th edition? I’ve gotta admit, this is probably the least worthwhile thing that’s popped up on my media radar.

The conversion over to 20 base play was a big thing. 3rd Edition actually involved a lot of changes to make the game more comprehendable to players just starting to play.

(and this went over well, albeit irritating to anyone currently playing with the somewhat easier if higher learning curve 1st edition rules)

But that’s what you get when a bunch of technical folks design a math system for doing something. High learning curve with a fairly efficient method of accomplishing your goal. I’m sure that’s worse for sales.

So what do you get with the new shiny 4th edition, aside from new cover art?

Apparently, a lot of “Warcraft”-isms. Fancy names for things that have been around, if not codified in the “official canon” since the inception of the game. When they’ve made an official class called “Warlord” (see here) I don’t hold out much hope that this’ll be a meaningful release.

Remember, I don’t need to even *buy* the book to play the game anymore. The rule set, when reduced down to a bunch of D20 rolls, fails to need much explanation. And really, do you need to buy loads of manuals for a game that’s basically made up on the fly by the storyteller? Or in advance, for that matter… but they’re still doing the heavy lifting. The reference material is only marginally relevant.

Hell, I don’t even like the whole “ability and feat” thing. It adds in too much fiddly stuff to remember, detracts from the story, and at the end of the day doesn’t help much… this type of thing works for CRPGs because the computer is remembering everything for you.

When I have to actually track all sorts of things, try to figure out what a character needs the “lockpicking ability” instead of just having a single quick chart for the rogue class…

In short, I think I’ll go run a game without any extra cruft, just the base stats to roll against, and see how that goes to test this hypothosis that it’ll work smoother.

Until next time.

So it’s been a while since the Fell trade paperback was published right? Mid last-year or so.

And then it just stopped being published. Which is kinda irritating.

My best guess is that they’re not paying Ellis and Templesmith enough to make it worth a constant release.. despite the comic being one of the hardest to find blockbuster sellers I’ve ever seen.

Granted, it does have a hard format to write. But while it’s very dense it’s also very short, which in theory balances out. For a good example of why, see many of the webcomics (or heck, even Phil Phoglio’s stuff, he’s been doing the format for ages). So the “it’s incredibly hard to do” statement doesn’t really wash for me.

So what with Ellis being hot property as a writer and all, he’s probably making more doing other projects at the moment and DarkHorse has to take what they can get. Just speculation.

Still, Fell is a great series and I’m patiently waiting for more releases. Even if I do have to make runs out to comic book shops that still have issues in stock (re: in New York) whenever they decide to release one.

So I was thinking of how to post some updates of what I’m listening to. Then I considered the fact that last.FM catalogs everything from Amarok.

Which turns out to be a win all around, for now.. now you can check what I’ve listened to recently journalized to your right.

I know. You’re all very excited.

It occurred to me that I haven’t put a series specific write up for anime lately, or anything on what I’ve been reading and listening too. Here’s a brief post to remedy that, possibly with some specific write-ups later.

Reading:

• “Whitechapel Gods” by S.M. Peters
• “Undead” by Richard Lee Byers
• “Wrath of a Mad God” by Raymond Feist
• “Twilight Watch” by Sergei Lukyanenko

And watching:

• Welcome to the NHK!
• Karas
• Zombie Loan
• Night Magician
• Samurai Champloo
• Ouran High School Host Club
• Genshiken Season 2
• Rental Magika
• Denno Coil

And basically listening to the same run of audio. Nothing really exciting on that front. Groove Coverage, Tiesto, Ferry Corsten. Anjunabeats Worldwide off di.fm. A good run of Last.fm.

Even though it keeps insisting that I want to listen to bad 80′s New Wave and seriously clangy industrial, which I don’t.

And that’s it for now. Maybe I’ll have something up on the series or some single tracks that have caught my ear out of the noise.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Dennō Coil. The angle, youth wearing VR overlay glasses, sounded something like .hack. Fortunately that wasn’t the case.

What Dennō Coil does have is a compelling story line centering around a group of young protagonists and a not altogether far-fetched technological premise. Through the plot the authors have weaved urban legend and the vibrant imaginations of children starting to explore the wider world.

Our storytellers viewpoint for the story is well balanced with much of what happens being caused or influenced by a well-done and well thought out perspective I rarely see in film. It had me going right up to the end, not quite sure what the larger picture was.

So this is definitely one to watch. It’s got competent animation, a very approachable bit of science fiction, and a compelling story line.

Dan Zarella, always a propagator of non-obvious social memetics, has artfully crafted an article over the weekend on the science of laughter. Through it he gives a quick overview of some practical examples of laughter outbreaks along with a few medical examples to give his hypothesis credence.

Also, a suggestion that you can try it out at some point. Who knows, it might do you some good! Plus it’s guaranteed to cheer things up a bit and generally break up mindless monotony. (DanZarella.com)

Nochnoy dozor (Night Watch in English) was an excellent book by Sergei Lukyanenko. Night Watch the movie (in it’s original Russian, no need to watch a bad dub) is a mediocre movie that’s a horrible letdown from the novel it’s based off of.

Honestly, I’d say to give it a pass unless you want to see how badly a book can be translated into a movie.

The plot changes are drastic and largely unnecessary. One of the major ones is even listed as a “glitch” by Lukyanenko in his comments.. how on earth you glitch a major part of your adaptations plot is beyond me.

If you’d like to see the array of differences check the movie listing out over at Wikipedia.

Acting talent for the movie isn’t all that bad, casting is alright, with characters fitting in with their descriptions from the novel well enough. It all really comes back to the plot being a horrible adaptation that really chops the heart out of the story.

Read the stories (although I found Day Watch to be a bit odd and that it didn’t fit well with Night Watch/Twilight Watch) but give the movie a pass. Or catch it on broadcast TV.. this one’s not even worth a rent. I’ll post if Day Watch (the movie) is any better when I pick up a copy to check out.

Sometimes things look a bit strange from their description and you decide to take a chance on them. So it went with Baccano!, described as a not-wholly in chronological order series about a myriad of people who’s lives intertwine around covered-up events on a train back in early 1930s.

Coincidentally the events on the train takes place in the middle of about three timelines, blending back and forth with minimal warning.

What I was worried about here was that I’d never know what I was looking at, which part of the story I was actually following. But they get around that with a device that’s usually irritating in film.

Most of the time when you see a shot from a different angle it’s annoying overkill on a point. Baccano! uses the affect in good measure to show where and when a certain scene is taking place. Same scene, different character.. at the same time, but strangely it works to move the plot along. You’ll quickly infer when it is by who is moving around and where they are.

So what I’m saying is if that all made sense to you, you’ll like the series. It’s about as fast paced as it gets and the audio/visual work is superb, the characters fun (if somewhat deranged), action filled bits of movement, and a mystery at it’s core. It might be a bit too much gore.. but nothing along the lines of, say, Sweeney Todd.

Added: almost forgot to put a link to the official Baccano! website.