So I contemplated the film industry around 6th or 7th grade when my yearbook teacher offered my friend and I a couple of cameras. He got a regular 8mm camera, and I got a large format camera--the kind you look down in. We swapped cameras, and I contemplated a career in film. In retrospect that was a psychological ploy, but whatever.
As school wore on, as I went through various tutors, as I tried to indulge in chemistry sets, reading books on astronomy, physics, dinosaurs, watching Sagan
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Gaming sessions can bring out the worst in people. We've all witnessed some pretty underhanded tactics in warsims or reprehensible behavior in RP sessions. Personally during one D&D session our cleric, with his plus 1 mace, perpetually hung to the rear for every encounter. His excuse was that "I'll heal you" by invoking his god's healing prayer. Anyway, I got so angry that I had my 100 strength character grab him by his clerical robes, and throw him towards that pack of undead skeletons tha
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So, C4 is a military grade explosive, and that's not what I'm going to talk about here.
As I stated in my previous web log entry, if quantum loop gravity theory is correct in that the graviton carries the gravitational force, then, in principle, it may be possible to go faster than C if that carrier can be shunted. It would be something akin to Lionel Jeffries' character from "First Men in the Moon" with "cavorite" which blocks gravity like a window shade or curtain blocks light.
Way back in high school when I decided to change course from science and engineering to the arts and commercial feature films, one of the big issues was finding or creating the right story for the right game that I was going to shoot.
The white elephant in the room was that most gaming sessions have a portion of moral ambiguity to them. Whether your dealing with hack-n-slashers in 3e AD&D or some very "moral oriented" players with that one goof ball who thinks it's funny to open fire on any
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Finding the right story for a screenplay based off of anything is hard work. You can't just port a gaming session to story or screenplay format. Not because of any difficulty in translating action, but because most warsim gaming sessions (and a large chunk of RP sessions) are morally ambiguous, or just downright amoral or even rarely immoral.
Using actions from a gaming session can be used as a basis for a plot template. Rarely can does a gaming session have a good moral structure to it
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So I'm trying to wrap up this web log with a smattering of closing issues. One of which is going faster than C inspired by not just Trek but a plethora of scifi properties and a general desire to get to places distant within a life time.
I finished Carlo Rovelli's book "Reality isn't what it Seems" on quantum loop gravity. The idea here is that gravity or the gravitational force is carried by the graviton. If that's true, then, in principle, if may be possible to go faster than light by sh
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I just found out that Prince Phillip passed away at age 99. When times were dark he helped pull me out of my malaise, and as of a few days ago last of my issues left, in no small effort to him. I never met him personally, but he knew all about me.
I just wish I could have served with him. He seemed to be the most ardent and traditional of royalty. He was blunt and let you know your faults. More and more people are living to or close to the century mark. Someday we will defeat death en
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So, here are some adventures and/or adventure seeds that I might have posted in the "Other Games" section of the forum, but feel I can best explain them here.
I bought this and took my group through it. However, unlike the cover art, there is not super sized mobile land fortress with speedy treaded vehicles zipping from some massive hangar bay. It turns out it's about a warlord and a secret facilit
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Rolling dice and telling the game master what your character is doing is the kind of freedom you don't get when watching a film or reading a novel. You're there and part of the story. You're there helping to tell the story. You're saying what you (or your character) would do in some situation. That's what makes gaming great.
There used to be a B. Dalton Bookseller down at the Stanford Shopping Center next to the Stanford University campus off of El Camino. It was two stories tall, with t
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So, I've vented lots of negative stuff about film, Trek, TV and scifi in general, the family, and everything else. Which probably leads one to ask why I stuck with gaming and the genre for so long.
What you have to understand is that a lot of what I experienced was done without my knowledge. I had no idea I was being helicopter parented, and no real notion or other education on what film and TV were really about.
My first experiences with Trek fans and scifi fans as a whole was very p
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