ChrisTalbot.com

Nostalgia makes you do silly things -- like buy a box of Tang while you're at the grocery store. Mmm... Tang.

Some random links to cool stuff:

Blood Puddle Pillows

A list of places to buy edible insects. Chocolate-covered scorpions -- see, now that would actually be tempting.

And the coolest hot air balloon ever. The Dark Lord of the Sith never looked so full of it -- hot air, that is.

For Stargate fans: Odyssey Prime.

I first of that Odyssey Prime a couple of weeks ago, and I almost bought a copy of the book for two reasons. One, I think Stargate would make a neat campaign setting for an RPG. Two, it's Unisystem-based. I decided against it because the total cost was going to be more than $50 with shipping and conversion of U.S. dollars to Canadian loonies.

Still, the Stargate concept is something I'd like to toy with as an RPG campaign (even if it's just a short campaign). However, here's a twist: What if the Stargate was found not by the government/military but by the private sector? What would a multi-national corporation do with the Stargate? And what would happen if things got out of control?

The first listen is done. Year Zero isn't terrible, but it's not the great concept album that Trent Reznor's marketing hype was building it up to be. While there are some catchy industrial/techno tracks, much of the album seems simplistic and not up to Reznor's standards.

For an album based on a vision of a dystopian future, I also would have thought it would be a lot darker.

Nerdly behaviour continues: I watched most of WKRP last night (about eighteen of the twenty-two episodes).

Now I'm listening to the new Nine Inch Nails album. Three tracks in, I'm thinking it's only okay. It's not doing much for me.

WKRP is here! I know what I'm doing tonight. :)

Jacquie and I had made plans for Saturday to go on a Niagara wine tour being organized for Durham teachers, but lack of interest has suddenly opened up our Saturday.

On a positive note, Amazon has shipped my WKRP In Cincinnati: The Complete First Season, so that should be arriving soon. Also included in the order is Perfect Blue and R.O.D.: Read Or Die, so I'm going to get a bit of an anime fix, as well.

The last issue in my Against The Odds Magazine subscription arrived on Friday, and I've decided that I'm not going to renew. Although the magazine and the games are generally of fairly high production quality (and the articles are interesting reads -- when I get around to reading them, that is), I haven't been impressed with the choices of battles.

In the last year, there has been one World War 2 Pacific naval battle (little bores me more than modern naval warfare), an American Civil War game (no interest), a French/Vietnam game (which might see the light of day some year) and a 14th Century Russian/Mongol war game (which is the only one I really want to get on the table).

The next year's worth of issues aren't very interesting, either. Coming up next is yet another WW2 naval battle (snore), followed by an Ancient Egypt game with a focus on chariots in battle (possibly interesting) and yet another WW2 naval game (what the hell?). If the chariots game looks interesting enough, I might buy it on its own, but with two WW2 naval games in the next year, renewing my subscription definitely isn't worth it.

Someone posted this on a Facebook profile, and it made me laugh. I figured I'd pass it on. Just follow the directions and enjoy:

Go to Google.com
Click on Maps.
Click on Get Directions.
From: New York, New York.
To: Paris,France.
Now, scroll down to line 24. Read it.

I'm trying to think if I've ever had a comic book store experience as bad as this one. Hmm...

Both Dungeon and Dragon are being cancelled. *gasp*

If I do get back to running PbPs regularly, I'd like to have some control over the format. I recently tried running a one-on-one James Bond 007 RPG PbP via wiki, and I wasn't really thrilled with that format at all. Additionally, I have no intention of going back to dealing with the reliability issues of YahooGroups, which is how I ran my last Vampire: The Masquerade PBeM.

Message forums would probably work the best, so I set this up to fiddle around a bit and, if all goes, eventually run a game via message forum.

I'd considered running a game at RPG.net, but the site has a couple of restrictions on how you can run your games. Specifically, you get one in-character thread and one out-of-character thread. That may be fine if your game is going to last a few hundred posts, but after awhile, it starts to get a bit unwieldy.

Consider this a general invite to my RPG-playing friends to take a look at the forum, to join and to hang out there and chat if you so choose.

I was flipping through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG over lunch, and I know for sure it's a game I'd really like to try out. Trying to get it going as a tabletop game probably won't work, so I'm contemplating taking it to the play-by-post world.

Is this simply morbid or the most useful tattoo you could get?

Delta Green is finally coming out. It looks like the new core book (long overdue, by the way) will be appearing in retailers by the end of May.

I've been dying to get my hands on this for what seems like ages.

Zombie Fluxx!!!

The Conservative Party must be worrying about what kind of hold it has on the reins of power right now. Someone from the party just called here to ask if I or Jacquie would consider voting for the Conservatives when the next federal election is called.

My answer?

"Doubtful."

I need to learn how to do video capture from VHS and then learn how to do DVD authoring. There are a couple of old VHS videos I have that are unlikely to ever be released on DVD, but I'd like to get them onto digital media in some form or another.

Thanks to Logan, I now have the hardware to connect a VHS machine to my computer, so now I need to figure out what software I need ... and then get to it.

Cerebus: Latter Days is killing me. I thought Jaka's Story and Melmoth were bad for having pages upon pages of text, but at least most of the text in those two volumes was interesting. I'm only about three-quarters of the way through Latter Days, and for the last dozen or two pages, Cerebus has done nothing but analyze the Bible. Worse, it looks like this goes on for the rest of the book.

Let's see how long it takes before Rawl cusses me out for posting these...

It's April. It's cold. We've even got snow in the last week. Global warming my ass!

This is coming at the perfect time. I just finished my MASH DVD collection.

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

I had to point this out: Sad Kermit. Make sure to watch the video for Hurt.

I'm not sure I like the new Google-driven Blogger, so I'm starting to think about new options for blogging software -- either an online service or finally figuring how to install something like Movable Type on the back-end of my site.

Does anyone have any good tips for transferring content over?

I'm really liking the new edition of Shadowrun. I've been reading it off and on over the last few days, and I like how the designers managed to incorporate several technologies are popular now and will likely continue to increase in popularity (RFID and wireless Internet).

I'd love to play this game a bit more often than the Missions games at Worlds Collide that happen every couple of months or so, but unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to have the opportunity to do so.

I finally had to dig up all of my receipts from last year and put together an itemized list of expenses for tax purposes. Every year, I put this off as long as possible, but I've run out of time. Everything is going off to the accountant this week.