When I first cruised over to YouTube it had an eclectic collection of videos. The topics were various. No one dominated. There were no influences from major media companies of any sorts. But now everytime I go there, logged out that is, all of the videos are presenting media figures and promoting major media properties.
I don't recognize any of the names, but they're actors or people who were grabbed off the street to get shoved into some reality show or some other media property, and
...More
"V" was a science fiction show that aired in the mid 80s, and was another offering in the wake of Star Wars. It's primary story was about a reptilian race disguised as humans coming to steal our water and experiment on us.
The truth is I don't have too many memories of this series because it never really grabbed me. The "chemical" the visitors want is water. Ho hum. Since the universe is mostly hydrogen, and water being an extremely abundant compound in the universe, one wonders where th
...More
Well, mother, after my friend David, a devout Catholic (in case you're interested, Catholicism being a big thing for you) ran a session of Dungeons and Dragons, I was hooked.
Dungeons and Dragons is no different than any other game made by the big popular mainstream game companies like Parker Brothers, Hasbro or whoever. When you play Monopoly you roll dice to move your piece, and you decide whether or not to buy a property, or make a deal if it's already owned. You are essentially role pl
...More
I bought Alien Realms maybe a year or two after it was first published.
http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Alien_Realms
I was attracted to it by the abstract cover art, but when I read through the pages I discovered more abstract character oriented scenarios, and no dungeon crawls. Even at that late in "the game" I was still under a lot of misapprehension or misunderstanding of Traveller's "true colors", so to speak, in terms of it being more of a law enforcement oriented game and tool than
...More
I sent a real angry email to the local PD about being stalked online. Having my net connection nuked during games and my net browser history being repeated to me in game chat. That's on top of all the other bullshit I was put through.
Or, more broadly, life in the universe. To me life is a system of chemicals that is able to duplicate itself through the use of other chemicals, elements and compounds with known physics. It's why animals on our planet are considered life and why a crystal lattice in some rock isn't.
I think solar radiation, and I mean extreme solar radiation, breaks down unshielded chemical processes. And therefore you get life on Earth, but not the moon because of our magnetic field generated by our spin
...More
Suffice it to say that the TTA books, in a time that was pretty mundane, were another bright spot in a world that seemed to be going backwards or standing still.
You younger readers have to imagine a time when you couldn't just log on and look up some factoid. Oh sure, you could call the library and ask a question, and they'd happily look it up for you, but rarely did anyone do that, and it was kind of a pain because you had to interact with someone. There were cars, phones (land lines),
...More
I've made it a point not to write about the 70s. I didn't like the 70s. Nothing really good for me personally came out of that era, and other than a few familial events it was a pretty boring time to be alive. However, in the wake of Star Wars' success (or perhaps coincidentally, though I doubt it) there was a flurry of scifi stuff put onto what had been up to that point a predominantly Star Trek oriented fanbase, audience and market. One of those things was a series of books authored by th
...More
So I tract down that pseudo science doc from the 70s, and it's far more campier than I remember, but still has that veneer of authenticity. Or it would were the material just not so laughable. However, I didn't get as angry at it as I thought I would. Oh sure, I burst a few blood vessels, but not like I would have ten years ago.
Ultimately I guess it doesn't really matter whether people believe in big foot, UFOs, ghosts, ESP and whatever else. But I still think it highly irresponsible to
...More
So, I saw Rogue One in the theatres like a lot of other people. I didn't think too much of it, but neither did I dislike it. I suppose my one observation of it is that it was very dark in tone, and it felt like the same people who wrote the Blade Runner sequel also wrote Disney's new Star Wars' film. That is to say the graphic novel feel and story structure (lots of self referencing and odd quirky moments that don't belong) were apparent in Rogue One. So was a lack of spontaneity and explor
...More