Comment word verification off (again)

At the end of October I temporarily reactivated word verifications for comments here on the blog. Spambots were hammering several older pages without mercy, and I thought this action would give me a brief respite and the bots might move on. Seeing a post on G+ today about captchas reminded me that -- since it's been more than a week -- it was time to discontinue verifications and open the comments again.

Blogger is excellent about automatically purging the spam messages. Notifications still get sent to me, and I'll continue to keep an eye on them. There has to be a better way to deal with the 'bots than to inconvenience real blog readers.

Pardon our dust

I plan to do some experimenting with the template design here over the weekend, especially with font sizes and background colors. Things might look wonky for a bit. It should be set (or back to this template) by Monday.

My First Time...Gaming on G+

Two weeks ago I played my first game using Google+ Hangouts.

This was a D&D 3.5 game based on the computer game Dwarf Fortress, so all of the PCs are dwarves. Many of the players were also in my True20 Freeport campaign. The reason for running over G+ is because half the players are out of town -- C. moved to Ohio before the Freeport game ended, and D.W., the DM for this game, moved to Mississippi shortly after it ended.

To play, we needed to join the same G+ Hangout. Additionally, D.W. set up maps with tokens for PCs and NPCs using the free Maptools software, which required each of us to connect through a VPN.

I did have some technical issues, but none of them were the fault of D.W. He and C. had worked out the bugs during their initial session. All I had to do was follow the emailed instructions. At first I tried using my usual desktop machine. I picked up an inexpensive webcam after work, brought it home and plugged it in. The camera test worked fine. Maptools worked fine, but I could not get into the G+ Hangout.

Mrs. Kaiju wasn't home, so I moved the webcam and the Maptools and VPN files (including my token) over to her Win 7 laptop. I was able to finally connect to the Hangout and see/hear everyone, although now Maptools would not load. Since it is a Java program, I tried to update Java but the update failed. It took a complete uninstall and reinstall of Java for Maptools to work.

Maptools is an impressive bit of software. I was concerned about how it might work, but it ran great, and D.W. put a tremendous amount of work into the maps for this session. The maps loaded quickly and token movement was easy and fast.

Overall, my experience with G+ Hangouts and Maptools was very positive. Once I moved to the laptop, the only issue was that I kept being dropped from the Hangout about every 15 minutes. The Google error messages kept saying it was a server error, but I was the only one being dropped. Once I can get that settled (and upgrade my desktop PC), things should work well. It's no substitute for face-to-face gaming, but being able to video chat with friends across the country in real time is terrific. I'm looking forward to more G+ gaming with them and local friends, and maybe some gaming with other bloggers too.

Link: SOPA and the RPG blogging community

I rarely ever post anything here about politics. This blog is meant for important things like games and movies. However, this is a topic that requires more attention than it has received in the mainstream media. Michael at Neuroglyph Games posted an excellent article about the possible effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act on RPG bloggers (and everyone else). There is a committee vote scheduled for tomorrow.

Update: "Markup postponed due to House schedule."

Cult Classic of the Week: Logan's Run (1976)

Based on the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan's Run was released in June of 1976. Less than one year later Star Wars hit theaters, and everything would change. The film, then, acts almost like a bridge between the darker, dystopian theatrical science-fiction films of the 1960s and early 70s, and the blockbuster science-fiction films of the late 1970s and after. Science fiction on TV, however, still looked the same into the early Eighties: shows such as Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica, for example, had sets with lots of glass, blinking lights and chrome panels.

I remember seeing the movie on TV once or twice, but most of my early memories of it were from the short-lived Marvel Comics series and articles in Starlog and other magazines. I clearly remember the vast majority of photos in those articles being 1) the futuristic cityscape miniature, 2) the still of Michael York firing the Sandman gun with its distinctive four-way muzzle flash, and 3) Farrah Fawcett. Of course, the nudity was edited out of the TV print.

In the 23rd century, a perfectly-balanced society run by a central computer system exists within a multi-domed city. Life exists only for the pursuit of pleasure, which grows more intense as each person approaches his or her thirtieth year and their Lastday: entering into the performance known as Carousel with the hope of "renewal". Some members of the population try to avoid this fate and run, escaping the city for a mythical Sanctuary. When Logan-5, a "Sandman" who's job it is to terminate runners, finds a symbol of Sanctuary on a runner's body, the computer assigns him the task to go outside the city and find Sanctuary and the missing runners, setting his own lifeclock forward to Lastday... 

Logan's Run was an impressive film for the time in which it was made, and it has that MGM "epic film" look to it. It was one of the last to develop from that massive 1960s-70s studio system. A budget of $9 million was quite a lot for a film in 1975, and the studio made a profit with it, earning around $50 million worldwide. Much of the action takes place in indoor locations and would have cost much more if shot entirely on soundstages. The crew took advantage of several "futuristic" looking buildings in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area for many of the indoor locations. They also used older buildings such as a sewer plant for some of the undercity locations.  Even then, the sets that were constructed for the film are really well done. Logan's apartment, the "New You", and most impressively, the computer room at Sandman headquarters. The size and scope of that room are beyond what I imagine for most films made at the time. It reminded me of the extravagantly large sets from an earlier MGM classic, Forbidden Planet.

The film's visual effects certainly deserved the Academy Award that was won the following year. Three effects sequences stand out: the wire effects for Carousel, the cityscape miniatures, and holography. The scene of Logan's interrogation by the computer was the first use of holograms in a major motion picture. In the audio commentary director Michael Anderson mentions that although they looked flat in the film, they were much more three-dimensional in real life.

The miniature cityscape was an outstanding achievement for the time. Much of its effect was due to the size and detailing. I did not know that it was built at a scale where many of the buildings were four or five feet tall. Stock footage of the city continued to be used in science-fiction films and television shows for years, including (apparently) one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Logan's Run shares many similarities with another dystopian classic, George Lucas' THX-1138. In both films, we have future societies insulated from the outside world, a complacent population, a society run by and dependent on one or many ruling computer systems, and at least one character who fights to find a way out. The main difference being that in Logan's Run the population live for fun without care, while in THX-1138 the people of the city are drugged worker drones without any type of social life. I watched THX-1138 again fairly recently, and I'll have more to say about it in some future post. The thought crossed my mind while watching Logan's Run that they could exist in the same universe--the worker drones of THX-1138 could be living in the undercity of Logan's Run, doing all of the manual labor and manufacturing to keep the upper levels of the domed city functioning.

The film inspired a television series of the same name which lasted one season on CBS, and is probably most notable for the cars.

I watched the 1999 MGM DVD of the film, which has since gone out-of-print. Warner Home Video released it in 2000 in a cardboard snapper case with both widescreen and fullscreen versions (minus the 8-page insert), again in 2007 in a standard Amaray plastic case, and on Blu-ray in 2009.

Cult Classic of the Week: Alphaville (1965)

Jean-Luc Godard was one of the leading filmmakers of the movement known as the French New Wave. The style and techniques used in Breathless (1960), his first feature, changed the landscape of cinema forever. As his career progressed, his politics tended to overshadow his technique. Along with Contempt (1963), Alphaville might be one of Godard's more conventional films.

American ex-pat actor Eddie Constantine found his niche portraying the private eye Lemmy Caution in a series of low-budget French crime films produced during the 1950s and early '60s, and based on the work of 1930s British writer Peter Cheyney. Even in other movies, the gruff, no-nonsense personality of the Lemmy Caution character carried over because of his popularity.

In true Godard fashion, Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution is a departure from the norm: an existential sci-fi noir/private eye film. Instead of Cold War Europe, the film finds Caution in a nebulous future era. He's sent by the Outer Countries to the technological "utopia" of Alphaville to find a missing scientist. Using his cover as a journalist, he makes his way through various levels of the bureaucracy (technocracy?), making contact with another undercover agent and falling in love with the scientist's daughter. That doesn't stop Caution from using her to get to the heart of Alphaville, the sentient computer Alpha-90. It's a battle of love and poetry versus the cold calculating logic of the machine that controls an entire population--and wants to expand that control to the Outer Countries.

I say "nebulous future", because it's unclear just exactly when or where the action takes place. Caution mentions being a veteran of Guadalcanal, which puts him in the post-war 20th century. He drives what looks like an early-'60s Mustang. The streets have other motor cars and buildings that would be at home in 1960s Paris, albeit futuristic modern architecture fitting the story.

However, there is the geopolitical question: what are the "Outer Counties"? Is "Nueva York" New York City? Where is Alphaville located? The weather and daylight are different from the north side to the south side. I like to think that it's an isolated island city-state in the middle of the Atlantic, based on the night scenes of driving to and from Alphaville, filmed on long streetlight-lit straight roads.

But then there is the talk about "galaxies". Lemmy's car is a "Ford Galaxy". Alpha-90 speaks about Caution traveling "light-years" across "open space". Caution is offered control of at least one "galaxy" in exchange for his cooperation. Because of the anachronistic mix of words and images, I believe that one possible reading of the film is that it's all a fever dream; it only exists in the mind of the Lemmy Caution from his other films, a nightmare brought on by the ever-increasing danger and loss of identity in the post-war atomic age.

I'm not sure that it really matters if the story is set on Earth or if Alphaville is another planet. Godard is playing with the conventions of the pulp/noir film drama, mixing in his own meditations of life, the meaning of art, beauty, and what it means to be human in an increasingly tech-driven consumer-focused society where the people move in circles and more words are removed from the "bible" (a dictionary) every day. It's very much in the same realm as other science-fiction dystopias as 1984, Brave New World, and films from Soylent Green to Blade Runner. It was also one of the inspirations for the name of this blog.

I watched Alphaville using streaming Netflix. The Criterion Collection released it very early on DVD (with only a liner notes essay, available online) although it appears to be out-of-print currently. I'm not sure if Criterion still the rights. If so, I hope they consider updating this title to a proper special edition on DVD or Blu-ray. Many of Eddie Constantine's other Lemmy Caution films are available from Sinister Cinema.

Links of the Week

Some links that I found interesting in the past two weeks:

Dungeons & Dragons alignments in the Doctor Who universe.

Dungeons & Dragons alignments in the Batman universe.

An Apple engineer recreates the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism... out of Lego.

The best tic-tac-toe moves for any situation.

The evolution of human flight in film.

21 scandalous secrets revealed on WookieLeaks.

Equation: Formula for Calculating a Skycraper’s Sway (and the pendulum that keeps it in place).

Cheap DIY Camera Systems Perform Amazing Photographic Feats.

Coding for the masses.

The flight manual for the Harrier Jump Jet.

The 1982 Tron Holiday Special.

Night-time photos of Earth from the International Space Station.

More incredible photos from the ISS, including some of the most inspiring... and most creepy.

Various opinions on net neutrality

I try to avoid writing about political issues on this blog. This should be a space to get away from that and talk about games, movies and other fun things. The idea behind what is known as "net neutrality" shouldn't be a political issue but it has become one.

For better or worse, the internet is an important part of our lives, and if you are interested in this medium (since you are reading this blog, I assume that you are) you owe it to yourself to research this issue and the ramifications.

This has been a hot story this week due to the upcoming FCC vote and the Comcast-Netflix conflict. Here are a few recent stories:

FCC Announces Net Neutrality Order for December Meeting
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/net-neutrality-order/

Comcast Busted: New Tolls for Netflix Aren't All You Should Worry About
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/comcast-busted-new-tolls-_b_789786.html

FCC chief backs some rationing of Internet traffic
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101201/media_nm/us_fcc_netneutrality

Julius Genachowski, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission: Preserving a Free and Open Internet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julius-genachowski/preserving-a-free-and-ope_b_790553.html

FCC Chairman Announces Fake Net Neutrality Proposal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-silver/fcc-chairman-announces-fa_b_790307.html

Odd uses for the Trek Original Series font

Typography is an important component of written communication, yet sometimes underrated by the public at large. The content of the message is paramount, of course, but the right font can add so much.

Conversely, a poor choice of font can disrupt the intention of the message, either conveying an impression other than intended or worse, laughter and ridicule -- the over-use and misuse of Comic Sans, for example.

Some fonts are iconic. These fonts are so tied to their original or most well-known use that if one of these typefaces is used for another purpose, the effect is jarring. We wonder why it is being used for this purpose, why did someone choose this font and not another.

For me (and I'd assume many others), the typeface used for the titles of the original Star Trek TV show fit in that iconic category. The oblique tilt, the swoop of certain parts of letters, and the futuristic vibe are very strong. There doesn't appear to have been a name given to it at the time, and it wasn't seen elsewhere until years later when an official licensed font pack for PCs was released. Numerous share/freeware imitations have also appeared.

For whatever reason, in the past year I've seen many examples of the Original Series font popping up, particularly in the publishing world. I'm not sure why. I don't believe it has to do with the new movie; perhaps there's a feeling among graphic designers that it no longer holds that iconic status with new media consumers.

Here are a few examples. They just don't seem right to me.

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

"Plug and Play? Back in my day we had to get a new driver disk in the mail!"

Via GeekDad over on Wired. The comments are funny, too. There are only two items on the list that I'm not familiar with.

I'm sure many of you can come up with your own lists like this...

Dragon Age Warriors

A couple of additions to something I mentioned here before.

Dragon Warriors is a compilation of rules from an English gamebook series released in the '80s. The Free RPG Day quickstart rules are available from the Mongoose site. Looks like old-fashioned gritty RPG play in the grand British tradition. I'm glad they have the Free RPG Day booklet available in PDF. I almost picked it up that day but for my "one item to a customer" choice I opted for the Hollow Earth Expedition quickstart instead.

Dragon Age is a tabletop RPG designed by Chris Pramas, released by Green Ronin and based on the upcoming videogame from the folks who created Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. I have high hopes for the tabletop version. The current plans call for a boxed set release, so it could be a neat and easy entry into the hobby.

I'm disappointed by what I see for the videogame. Since they also did Baldur's Gate, I had hoped this would be another good co-op button-masher RPG that Mrs. Kaiju and I could play together. We've been looking for another one after finishing BG: Dark Alliance and the two Everquest/Norrath games on the PS2. Dragon Age will be a single-player-only third-person RPG.

Goodbye, Circuit City

I'm really disappointed to see the end of Circuit City. It was always nice to know that there was another large electronics retailer out there, for competition and for an alternative. Sometimes they would have a good sale price on an item. We got our TV from CC, and I've purchased computer memory on sale there (Kingston Value RAM that constantly crashes our machines...).

I went to the local CC for the liquidation sale about four weeks ago. Deals were scarce but items were still on most of the shelves. They still had a ton of video games, a decent selection of DVDs and many of their CDs were left. I picked up two '80s CDs for Mrs. Kaiju. It's sad but the sale prices were still a bit steep. That might be a reason why they're going out.

I went again this past Saturday. Now that the discount prices are actually discounts, the shelves are bare. Surprisingly at 50% off, I found a nice collection of DVDs. The video games were wiped out except the strategic stockpile of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock w/ included guitar for XBox 36o.

One thing I was looking for was an HDMI cable. Many of their cables were still left and 60% off list price. Even so, it's very difficult for me to see paying $56 for a store brand HDMI cable. The only worthwhile item I found on this trip was The Dirty Dozen on Blu-ray for $12.

Target had GE branded HDMI cables on sale last week but when I got there, they were sold out. It's OK, the store was substituting a sale price on a 50-foot coax cable instead. A perfect replacement! I went over to Menards and got a six-foot cable for $15.

It's easy to find a cheap price on the internets, but there are some moments when you need an item that day, and that's getting a little more difficult.

Computer issues

First post in a while. I had hoped to write more but we've been having problems with our main computer. I'll be spending the weekend re-formatting, re-installing and updating. Good times!