Still can't access Internet from new computer, vista doesn't want to talk to XP. Many of my core programs don't work with the system. AAAAAAAgghhhhhh. Hope to resolve soon.
Vista is proving to just as big a headache as I feared. It won't connect to my wireless network. It won't run my older programs from companies that are now defunct. It won't uninstall programs that don't run properly forcing me to restore to an earlier date which forces me to fix my registry.
Luckily I got my laptop back and I'll be using it for my campaign but I lost several hours worth of work when vista decided to be a bitch and stop running AD&D Core Rules II.
Well I'll be back to blogging soon and tell you everything that's happening.
-CJ
My lap top died 2 weeks ago and I ha to buy a desk top. Vista and I are still getting to know one another. Vista has some really good qualities but many of it little eccentricities drive me nuts. It despises some of my old programs that can't be updated, AD&D Core rules anyone, so I'm really behind in my projects.
I'm almost done with the maps and NPC's and just need to finalize encounters. I have to get busy with my sewing and I have to wire the new TV room. I've got a dozen movies I have to see and Herbie needs a kick in the pants again.
So it should be a bit more lively here soon as I don't think I can kill a desk top a readily as a laptop
-CJ
Prior entries on this site have established the staff of the AV Room as avid fans of role playing games. RPGs are an excellent means of developing the imagination. My current endeavor is an ambitious effort to introduce the nuances of role playing to a group of youngsters under the age of twelve.
In the past I would spend about two weeks of review before starting the latest installment of our 26 year old campaign .Having experience players gives the game master a solid foundation on which to build and also the flexibility to change things as needed. For the newest campaign I must plot as much in advance as possible.
When I finish I’ll have spent about 6 months planning out every detail. I’ve developed a system were they start as 0-level characters who haven’t fully developed there attributes or skills and through game play they will develop both to first level and character age 15. I want to cover several weeks a session so I plan on having them plot how juggle apprenticeships with studies and practice will be covered in minimal rolls based on time management charts, i.e. did they get there chores done in time to go to class. On their days off work they can do what they want
To keep them occupied I’ve created detailed city maps and their surrounding terrain. There are hundreds of NPCs with complex social groups governments, secret societies and new character classes. The ruins of the old city or liberally sprinkled with oodles of hidden goodies. And I’m plotting encounters galore. This will be my best thought out storyline for this campaign ever!
While there are lots of antagonist to keep the young players engaged I have to face my own enemy; boredom. I have to compete with RPG progeny, the video game. I will have to paint the most vivid pictures in their minds. So I’m enlisting Herbie’s art skills to help flesh out their characters as well as the parents to guide them though the mechanics and maximize their fun.
The ultimate goal is fun. For me fun will be the satisfaction of the player recounting game moments fondly. Now I just have to convince a group of tweens that sitting around a table rolling dice is fun.
-CJ
I am so tired.
I threw a birthday party for the wife Saturday. Went from 2 pm to 2 am. Woke up Sunday to find a burst pipe under my water heater.
My son begins testing next week so no television till the end of tests and reviews every night.
Most of the last week I've been trying to pin down Herbie to do more pod casts but LEX is giving him grief.
What's really been eating up my time is the new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I've scrapped everything form the last campaign; maps, characters, villains, organizations and most of the magic. I'm using elements of the previous 26 years as a foundation for the new campaign. Character classes no seen in almost 20 years are back but none of the players from then would recognize them. A new and larger city, the third one in the history of the campaign so far, has been built next to the flooded ruins of the old. New magics that are not as benign as they seem. Races have been wiped from the map and others that were never been prevalent before will come to the fore front in roles never imagined.
This is just mechanics; the hard part is this time most of the player will be 'tweens. I've never played with anyone under 16, including myself, and I'm very concerned with holding the attention of a generation that grew up with Play Station and Wii. I'm planning dozens of scenarios for each game session knowing how easily my own son gets bored. So I've set myself the challenge of keeping it intelligent and exciting while trying to instill a desire to actually role-play and not have the player just react. I've always strive to do so but the age of the players means I can not rely on natural curiosity to keep things going.
So pity the poor DM vying to win his sons heart from the silicone game monster.
I wonder if there is a saving trough versus media over load.
-CJ
We chose Allen Drinkwater author of "Victory" as our first interview and
he was a natural fit with the AVRoom's brand of podcast.
Intelligent and knowledgeable he tells us in no uncertain terms the reasons for writing his novella. Herbie and I have found a kinder spirit in this young man from Boston and will be speaking to him again in the future.
We hope you enjoy our conversation with Allen Drinkwater as much as we did.
-CJ
It seems like all we do here on The AV-Room is count down the lives of our heroes who we have passed. I'd like to think that life after 40 is more than that, that we can look at the culture we live in and think that our lives are ongoing, but it just isn't so. In the past six months since my friend CJ and I started the AV-Room we lost Steve Gerber, Gary Gygax, and also recently a personal idol, I won't call him a friend even though I met him 15 years ago and bonded with him while he was still drawing his strip for Eclipse Comics: Dave Stevens.
Dave Stevens was the finest illustrator I have ever met personally. He adored the early American illustrators, as much as Steve "The Dude" Rude, or Adam Hughes or even Frank Cho do today, but he was the first. His strip "The Rocketeer" was a fetishistic rite into early airplane culture, a return to the time of the pulps and the serials that it was clearly based on, but also an adaptation and a modern distillation to whatever is modern and nostalgic about the culture that our parents or our grandparents were obsessed with. It was a yesterday filtered, filled with the adolescent yearning of planes, adventure and pretty women.
Oh, and the specter of Betty Page. Dave and Betty, Betty and Dave. Tied together, his pictures captured her and translated her essence to a kid too young to have ever seen her at her best. I talked to one and yearned for the other through my teens. I yearned to draw like Dave though, and in the end that is what we can all aspire to. To have touched someone enough to have driven them to follow in our path. I'm sure the Adam Hughes's, and Steve Rude's will cite him as a primogeniture, but me I'll look at his splash pages and his pinups and wonder what might have been if he had lived.
He was born 10 blocks from where I was raised. Him and Weird-Al Yankovick, just ask me who I'd rather have around right now, He assisted Russ Manning on Tarzan, helped Doug Wildey in Saturday-morning animation, and kept alive the image and likeness of every pinup model who ever lived, or he had ever loved.
He was an inspiration, as much for him as Jack Kirby was even though I didn't have half the talent he did. I am thankful for his art and for The Rocketeer, and for Jennifer Connelly as Bettie Page, even if they couldn't get her likeness for the movie, although we all pictured her in fishnets and chains, and all that we have Dave Stevens to thank for.
I know he had given up on his greatest creation, embittered by his Disney vacation, but I'd like to say that he was an inspiration. Rest in peace Dave. Thanks for the memories. It was a pleasure to have met a true gentleman.
-Herbie Popnecker
Sorry for the delay in posting. A regional telecommunications company has acquired an another which translates to 12 hour days for me.
I'm doing research for a new podcast and setting up interviews. so keep an eye on the pod cast section.
-CJ
Do you remember that movie by Steve Martin "The Lonely Guy"? Didn't think so. It's a little know Martin vehicle that tells the tale of a suddenly single man struggling to find love and purpose and in his life.
I saw it when I was eighteen, my soon to be ex-girlfriend had left for college I was months away from active duty and I was killing time till then. A bunch of us were kicking it at Herbie's house 'cause he had cable. We were all big Martin fans and so we started watching "The Lonely Guy". We were laughing through the first half of the movie ragging on each other that this or that scene was taken from their life. It soon dawned on us that we were the character in the movie and the laughter ended.
It is a good movie but it made us think long and hard about our lives; sometimes I think that this is the reason Herbie Married LEX. We were all single and direction less contemplating college or career. Mine is the only generation I know that had midlife crisis in our twenties. In the go go eighties and nineties if you weren't making piles of cash or starting a family you were pretty much a dead beat or a slacker.
In a similar vain as "The Lonely Guy" is an on-line comic strip Garfield minus Garfield. Like many people my age I enjoyed the early years of this comic and proudly placed a stuffed replica of the pasta loving feline in my car window. But alas all good things must come to an end and so did Garfield.
What's that you say; "But Garfield is still running.", "I read it every day in my paper.", "They're working on a third movie.". My point is there hasn't been a good 'Garfield' comic in decades. The strip has become derivative of it's self, repeating fat jokes and pasta quips repeatedly, a sure sign it's past it's prime. The antithesis would be 'Get Fuzzy' with it's sharp word play and layered secondary characters that give the even deeper leads plenty to play with.
Into this figurative and literal two dimensional world stumbled a genius able to see past the one note name sake and see the story behind the fluff. The site says it best:
"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb."
When you think about it in real terms; only the mentally disturbed or terminally lonely converse with their pets. Anthropomorphizing your cat into a person you talk to and answers you back is not the sign of a healthy mind. In psychobabble terms Jon Arbucle is projecting his need for aformation onto his pets but his subconscious, feeding on his depression, reflects his self loathing off his pets back to himself. So his cat is just a cat and the snide remarks are Jon's ego manifesting and berating himself for his lack of initiative. Yeah he's that screwed up.
The absolute brilliance of G-G is the removal of the surrogate i.e., the cat, leaving Jon trapped in his own mind. We see a man stripped of his defenses naked to the world suffering though bouts manic depression, paranoia, worthlessness and some things to disturbing to contemplate. This is the lonely guy taken the nth degree. Yes I do see people I know as well as my self reflected in the eerily existential story within this strip.
Jim Davis would do well to consider branching out into edgier fare. He obviously has a lot of angst buried within himself as the edits on G-G shows. The problem is that the ironic artistry would probably be lost once it passed though marketing.
-CJ
Wizard Con LA had a number of interesting panels featuring the publishers and distributors in attendance. Unfortunately I could only break away from the friends I was escorting to see one I've already written about.
Though I missed the AVATAR Press panel I did manage the next best thing. I had a pleasant conversation with Marketing Director David Marks about the heavy weight talent the represent like Allen Moore, Frank Miller and Jamie Delano just to name a few. I have read a number of their titles with Warren Ellis' Crecy being the one I'd most recently read. David let me know that Warren Ellis had a special project under way for AVATAR; FREAKANGELS
FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield there are five installments which chronicle the lives of young hip psychics who live in the Whitechapel district of London after the end of the world. Seemingly indefferant to the state of the world they've carved out fiefdom for themselves.
This group of tragically beautiful pettygods who can't help but bicker among themselves wake one day to find their bohemian psyocracy is being threatened by a shotgun toting Manc slag out to avenge her brothers. The problem isn't the girl, it's what she represents. Some time ago one of the group of twelve left on poor terms and has hatched a plot to send brainwashed drones to eliminate his former compatriots.
The story is just starting to take form. We've been introduced to five of the twelve, one an installment so far. Each has their own quirks so it will be interesting how Ellis will develop twelve individual characters that are similar in looks but different in personality.
What I must give kudos to is the practical use of a tinfoil hat in a comic. Read it and you'll see what I mean.
-CJ
