The Blog

When you have a collection of 200+ RPGs, sooner or later you find yourself with the urge to make 200+ characters.

This blog started off as a collection of the characters I create during this project.

The goal is to create two characters for each game I own. One “standard” starting character, and one “sufficiently advanced” character to see what an experienced character would look like.

I have a few games where the character creation process requires some interaction with other players in the game – in those cases I’ll try to work with someone or a group of persons on various forums to complete the task.

The blog has also become the repository for all my other RPG pursuits – house rules, commentary on games we are playing, and currently the home to my home-brew game, Adventures in the New Kingdoms.

The Author

I’m Dyson. I’ve been gaming since 1978 in a variety of game systems, but most often playing Dungeons & Dragons (particularly Moldvay Basic). But that’s not to say I haven’t played other games along the way, with dalliances in science fiction, cyberpunk, urban fantasy, and other game settings.

I’ve even included a page about my 25 favourite games if you want a more concise history of my top RPGs.

Currently we are playing a *lot* of RPGs in my various groups that I game with regularly.

. . . More

- consider the fellow endorsed - FUN FOR ALL,....and fun to explore

CHECK THIS GUY OUT,...RPG BERSERKERS !
LINK- - -
http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/

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A quick guide to stuff of mine that will be published in 2011:

First off, every month you can get the latest issue of the ongoing Farscape comic book (co-plotted by Farscape creator Rockne S. O'Bannon, art by Will Sliney), as we continue the year-long "War for the Uncharted Territories" storyline. Issue #15 (Part 3 of the arc) comes out in January.

BOOM! has also been rereleasing the Farscape hardcovers in trade paperback. The last two are coming out in January and February: D'Argo's Trial (art by Caleb Cleveland) and Gone and Back (plotted by Rockne, art by Tommy Patterson).

After that, expect the Farscape stories to be released on a regular schedule in trade, including D'Argo's Quest (art by Caleb) finally being collected, as well as the story arcs of the ongoing series: Tangled Roots, Red Sky at Morning, and Compulsions (all plotted by Rockne with art by Will).

In February, BOOM! will also be releasing my Cars arc, Rust Bucket Rally (art by Travis Hill), in trade paperback.

And in March, IDW will put out the trade paperback collection of the five Star Trek: Captain's Log one-shots, including my Edward Jellico story (art by JK Woodward).

On the prose end of things, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun: Under a Crimson Sun (one of the novels in the "Abyssal Plague" event) will be released in June.

In addition, both More Tales of Zorro and Unicorn Precinct are tentatively set to come out in 2011. The former has my short story "Letter from Guadalajara," the latter is the long-awaited sequel to my 2004 novel Dragon Precinct.

With luck, there'll be more to announce as the year goes on...........................

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EvilSpirit sez, "The first lot of items from Dungeons & Dragons co-creator E. Gary Gygax's game collection has gone up for auction. 'Each numbered lot,' says the auction agent, 'comes with its own unique Certificate of Authenticity personally signed by Gary's widow Gail Gygax and an image of Gary's own signature stamp from 1983.' Proceeds go to the Gygax Memorial Fund."

E. Gary Gygax Auction begins (Thanks, EvilSpirit, via Submitterator)

Eric Eckstein -- Turkey King

Last year , I shared how thankful I was for the rise of cooperative gaming, but this year it really paid off. With friends forced to relocate to different parts of the country, we were able to stay in touch by working together in games like Halo: Reach, Dead Rising 2, Deathspank and Left 4 Dead 2. Even better, with L4D2's the Passing and Sacrifice DLC, it kept the relationship fresh...which leads me to my new thanks: the rise of DLC.
 
Let's not kid ourselves: DLC is not created out of some inner giving spirit on behalf of publishers, it's there to extend the lifecycle of a game and to make some extra coin. Yet regardless of the motives, when game DLC is done right (Mass Effect 2's Lair of the Shadow Broker, Rockstar's Undead Nightmare), the result is amazing and something truly to be thankful for. Gaming's future bodes well for 2011 DLC considering how strongly 2010 has been.

Kevin Kelly -- Boardgame Afficinado

I'm most thankful for G4, and all of the new friends I've made. I had to leave Joystiq behind in order to come aboard, and those guys are like family to me. But G4 has been a fantastic place to work, populated with great people, and it's the only place I can think of where you'll be discussing zombie mechanics one second, and talking about a naked woman using Kinect the next. Everyone has been extremely welcoming, except Steve Johnson, of course. That guy is like a curmudgeonly mountain man. "GET OFF MY CONSOLE," he'll shout every now and then, while telling us how good it was back in the days of Pong. "PIXELS! AMAZING!" He's crazy, I know.

I'm also thankful for DLC, but can we put a pause on it? I'm still trying to dig myself out from under Borderlands, and then Fable 3, Red Dead Redemption, and tons of downloadable games get shoveled onto me. It's one thing to be buried in games, but come on. Hold for just a sec, will ya?

Jake Gaskill -- Stuffing

This year, I’m thankful that there aren’t a million games being released between now and the end of the year (Only half a million). I’m glad to see publishers using the whole year, and spreading out releases to make our gaming lives complete all year round, rather than waiting to cram all of their top tier titles onto shelves in the final three months of the year. I’m also thankful to have such a creatively diverse collection of games to choose from these days. From mobile and downloadable games to AAA IPs, there is no shortage of phenomenal interactive experiences to be had across all genres and styles, and this will only become truer over the coming years. And a big thank you to everyone reading this right now! Without you, I’d just be talking to Stephen Johnson all day every day. The horror…the horror.

Patrick Roche-Sowa -- Blah-Dee Blah Blah

This year I am thankful for downloadable games. While the blockbuster titles have kept my interest, it’s the small, quirky, exciting games like Costume Quest, Shank, Scott Pilgrim, and Super Meat Boy that have really made 2010 a great year for games in my opinions. This incredible new distribution model has allowed developers to skirt the big name publishers and get their work, unedited, to the public. This holiday season, get the gamers in your family some Microsoft Points or PSN credit, they’ll thank you for it.


Mike D'Alonzo -- Shoemaker

I'm thankful for little games like Limbo and Super Meat Boy that remind us that, sometimes, there's just as much fun to be had in a bite-sized package as there is in a big box game that took years to make, market, and get to the stores. Sometimes, it's the little surprises that make you remember what was fun about playing games in the first place.


Steve Johnson -- Mr. Man

This Thanksgiving, I’m most thankful for thumbs. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to play video games.

Don’t be all, “What about Kinect??” because how would I be able to hitch a ride to the Best Buy to even buy a Kinect system in the first place, Smart Guy? They don’t call them toe-sticks, you know.

Also: I’m thankful for Love, Forgiveness and Happiness.

Dana Vinson -- Editrixie

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful that Kobe Bryant is man enough to hold a fake gun in a commercial for a game about fake war. I’m also thankful that the mainstream media isn’t a bunch of big babies who would go around bitching about what a bad role model he is for appearing in such a commercial, because I thought it was super sweet and he’s a grown man who can make his own decisions. Plus, it wouldn’t make any intelligent adult think that Kobe would actually advocate going around and shooting people in real life, right? Oops.

Nikole Zivalich -- Scholar

This Holiday season I'm thankful for several things. One of course is my family. There, I said it. Another thing I'm thankful for is Kinect. I haven't used it yet but I bought it and I got EA Sports Active 2. I haven't opened either and it's been over a week but it feels good to know I have the option to exercise. I'm also thankful for side-dishes because we vegetarians have limited options during the Holidays. But most of all I'm thankful for Moye, AKA Moye Caliente.  Her giggle brings tears to my eyes and joy to my heart.

Rebecca Jutzi -- SEO Queen, Queen of SEO. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

I am thankful that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood lived up to its franchise excellence and that I will be able to share that joy with my family this Thanksgiving (or not). The hours I slaved building my Project Legacy account on Facebook over the past few months were not wasted. And at least I got the Great Depression achievement when Abstergo foreclosed on more than thirty of my properties. I will try to take the life skills I learned in the Animus and apply them to cooking and basting a turkey. (Is it proper etiquette to carve a turkey with a hidden blade?)

I'm also thankful that after a summer of unemployment while farming Diablo 2 for gems and joining Dungeons and Dragons Online, I was hired here at G4tv.com. Now I can afford to buy new games and restart my WoW account again! It has been quite a crazy year, but a lot of good has come out of it.

Moye Ishimoto -- ATTACK OF THE MOYE!

Here's a thought: why can't Thanksgiving come after Christmas? That way I'd have so many more things to give thanks for, based on the number of gifts I get. So if Christmas this year goes exactly as planned, I'll be thankful for my family for giving me Kinect and for Dance Central, which will help me make more friends by teaching me to how to actually dance well so I can go out clubbing in Hollywood and not embarrass myself in front of strangers. If I don't get Kinect this year, then I'll be thankful for disowning my entire family because they didn't get me what I wanted and they never understood me in the first place. Take that, Mommy!

Eugene Morton -- Yo Yo King

I'm thankful that Fallout: New Vegas continues to fill a deep, emotional void in my life that friends and family never could. I love you, Fallout! You truly are the reason for the season. Also, not working for four days is good too, more time to spend with my beloved New Vegas.

Leah Jackson -- Gaming Scientist

As a PC gamer, I have a lot to be thankful for this year. But above anything else, I’m thankful for having the opportunity to go to Blizzcon 2010. Blizzcon was by far and away one of the best experiences I’ve ever had as a gamer. I got to play the latest and greatest versions of my all time favorite video game series, interact with fans that are just as passionate about Blizzard products as I am (a feat in itself), and meet some of the inspirational developers behind the games I adore. I even got the chance to hang out with some incredibly talented pro gamers that opened my eyes to eSports in a whole new way that I’ve come to embrace and absolutely love. It was truly a dream come true for me to go to Blizzcon this year, and I’m incredibly thankful to G4 for giving me the chance to go. Thanks G4!

Chris Monfette -- Tower of Power

Thanksgiving is one of several times throughout the year when I struggle out from beneath the incredible, soul-crushing weight of my middle-class American bliss to become consciously aware of just how damn fortunate I am in almost every respect. In a world in which basic everyday resources – let alone health and happiness – are hardly a guarantee…Where race, gender and sexual orientation are still the focus of great discrimination…Where young children are mocked for embracing what is that we here at G4 do on a daily basis…Where there are an infinite amount of problems greater, deeper and far more irresolvable than my own…Well, I’m thankful for what I’ve been given, personally and professionally, and reminded that I simply do not have the right, as a human being, to take that for granted. That it is, in fact, my responsibility, in some small way, to try and make the world better along the way. So to my friends and colleagues here at G4 and elsewhere; to my family and loved ones on both coasts; to our readers and to an industry that pays me to do what I’d just be doing anyway…You have my abiding thanks and appreciation. Happy holidays!

***** Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's no-doubt largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America. I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. But if I were anywhere near a comic shop, I would invoke my rights as a citizen of Planet Awesome to spend my days picking up and putting down the following. ***** SEP100044 BPRD HELL ON EARTH NEW WORLD #4 (OF 5) $3.50 It seems that not a week goes by without something from the Mignola-verse on the stands, which I bet is a big reason why these books do well despite being left mostly to themselves. JUN100035 GRANDVILLE MON AMOUR HC $19.99 This is a sequel to Bryan Talbot's anthropomorphic steampunk fantasy, coming out almost exactly one year after the first book's release. That's a first-class offering of its type of comic, even if that's a type of comic you don't necessarily read. JUL100144 BATMAN RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE #6 (OF 6) $3.99 I was going to write "Finally" but since it's DC I'm guessing there's probably a one-shot or two after this supposed last issue. That "JUL" can't be a good sign considering how tightly these various series are coordinated time-wise, either. SEP100305 CONSTANTINE HELLBLAZER CITY OF DEMONS #3 (OF 5) (MR) $2.99 I have to say, I don't really get the spin-off series from a mid-level performer strategy as it relates to anything other than goosing market share a tiny bit. JUL100231 NORTH 40 TP $17.99 This is the collection of one of the better-reviewed late-period Wildstorm books, a horror-fantasy set in a small town that seems to have touched on all the familiar aspects of that kind of literature without boring its fans. It's one of those book that I probably wouldn't buy, but I'd sure love to look over in a shop. You know, if I had one. Thanks, Marvelution. APR100224 SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI DELUXE HC $19.99 APR100223 SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI FACSIMILE EDITION HC $39.99 The strange thing is that as recently as five years ago you could still easily find the original of this powerful item of '70s kitsch for less than $10. I know, because I had to buy one. It's a pretty good comic, and its underlying craft strengths are a big part of what has kept it alive over the years. AUG100441 MAGE HC VOL 01 THE HERO DISCOVERED (NEW PTG) $39.99 It'd be fascinating to see what this one looks like on high-end paper and given the general, deluxe treatment. My memory of the comics -- and I still have them all -- is very much wrapped up in their being comics. SEP100342 DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS #1 $3.99 What the Internet is to comics in the 2010s, the bookstore to comics in the 2000s, and the music store to comics in the 1990s, the gaming shop was to comics in the 1980s -- a natural ally whose longevity will depend on factors that have nothing to do with comics at all. I have to imagine that boiled down to one or two comics and given to a writer with a light touch, a Dungeons and Dragons comic book could do okay. JUL100439 COWBOY NINJA VIKING #10 (MR) $3.99 This is a deeply weird adventure comic book series, about agents grafted with multiple personae in order to best fulfill their jobs of asskickery and related functions. While I can't imagine running out to see it I hope a recently announced movie version does well for them. It has that rare comics virtue (Thriller, later Giffen Legion Of Super-Heroes) of not giving a moist crap whether you understand what the hell is going on. SEP100596 ANT-MAN & WASP #1 (OF 3) $3.99 Here's a question. Are they collecting three-issue mini-series now? I liked the characters as they appeared in that Roger Langridge Thor comic, but every character that appears in that comic ends up being super-appealing. I kind of like the fact that Hank Pym has long been the Bob Meusel of the Lee/Kirby era, and there's likely something that can be done with that. SEP101196 ADV PROF THINTWHISTLE INCREDIBLE AETHER FLYER GN $14.99 One of comics' most beautiful Lost Children, a whimsical science fiction story that ran in the Ted White Heavy Metal. This age of reprints demanded its re-publication. If you saw it in one of its earlier iterations, it may have burnt a place in your memory that make re-reading it now a voyage of re-discovery, a visit to a time when comics -- the whole magilla -- seemed to be barely holding on. SEP100744 ELMER GN (MR) $12.95 I've enjoyed Gerry Alanguilan's surprisingly personal story of emotional fallout in the world talking chickens in every form I've read it, and I hope it does well in this iteration. AUG100760 MOUSE GUARD LEGENDS O/T GUARD HC $19.95 This is Archaia's companion piece to its successful work with David Petersen's Mouse Guard franchise; I have yet to read it, but I think Mouse Guard and Archaia are on principle worth more of our collective attention. SEP101084 SMURFS GN VOL 03 SMURF KING $5.99 SEP101083 SMURFS HC VOL 03 SMURF KING $10.99 I know a four-year old that's going to be happy about this. I think a lot of parents will be happy, too, as the series starts to stretch its legs and bit and get more Jay Ward-like in its ability to please the younger set and those that are reading to them. SEP100737 GLAMOURPUSS #16 $3.00 I think you'd be surprised for how many people this is their favorite serial comic book right now. SEP101143 TONOHARU GN PART 2 (MR) $19.95 One of the few self-published alternative book series of note (it's distributed by Top Shelf but published by the cartoonist), I enjoyed Lars Martinson's low-key soap opera set in the barest bones of an English-speaking community in a rural Japan (a place where Martinson himself taught) much more in this second volume than I did in the first. JUL101177 VAGABOND VIZBIG ED GN VOL 09 (MR) $19.99 AUG101179 TWIN SPICA GN VOL 04 $10.95 Your mainstream manga series offerings of the week, one a well-executed adventure story the other a quirkily-told coming-of-age drama set in a school for astronauts. JUN100999 EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC SEC HC VOL 01 $24.99 Fantagraphics' Tardi roll-out reaches new heights with this first in a series of books translating Tardi's fun and of course beautiful-looking turn-of-century adventure series. There's also a soon-to-be "Watch Instantly" favorite directed by Luc Besson out there, just waiting. AUG101019 TOYS I/T BASEMENT HC $14.99 AUG101076 TWO GENERALS GN $24.95 Two graphic novels that are more slipping out than arriving on the stands with fanfare, both from quality cartoonists (Stephane Blanquet, Scott Chantler) with impressive creative pedigrees. I look forward to reading them both. AUG100917 INKSTUDS SC $20.00 I'm enjoying dragging this one around the house to various sofas and easy chairs and catching a piece here or there -- it's as good a snapshot of comics right now as you're likely to read now that TCJ is gone in that monthly sense where it gave you a window into the world of comics just by engaging with so much of it. I'm in this book, but I'm avoiding that section; I don't remember really distinguishing myself in that particular interview. But the rest of it's pretty good. SEP101256 WILL EISNER DREAMERS LIFE IN COMICS HC $28.00 I'm still not all the way certain why another Will Eisner biography was necessarily called for just a few years after Bob Andelman's under-publicized take on the master cartoonist, but I suppose that means I can hope in that it's a wildly divergent take. Nobody ruin it for me. ***** The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there. To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this. The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options. If I didn't list your comic here, that's because I'm retrenching my overall strategies regarding this site following a poor showing in the midterms. *****

Digital distribution platform Good Old Games, despite recent controversy, has been on a roll with its releases for classic Dungeons & Dragons PC RPGs in the past month: Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale: Complete, and The Temple of Elemental Evil.

But now GOG has put out a collection for the module-heavy BioWare RPG that wrecked me years ago: Neverwinter Nights: Diamond Edition. This release includes the original Neverwinter Nights game, its three official expansions (Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark, and Kingmaker).

For just $9.99, you get all those games plus downloadable bonus content: 16 wallpapers, a soundtrack, 28 avatars, 77 artworks, and more. And of course, this includes the toolset Neverwinter Nights is known for, allowing you to not just host and act as Dungeon Master for different adventures, but create your own module from scratch.

My hope is that this GOG release will send thousands of people back to the game, and resurrect my favorite team-based multiplayer game of all time: a Team Fortress-inspired mod called Neverwinter Tactics. Then again, if that happens, you'd see a lot fewer posts from me on here, as I'll be too busy hunting down rogues with a min-maxed elven bard.

 

For years, when I taught my class in adolescent development, I began by telling students flat out that the 'storm and stress' theory of adolecence was just plain WRONG.  Most teenagers weren't depressed or angst ridden.  No, they weren't the victims of raging hormones.  And definitely they didn't suddenly start to hate their parents on their 13th birthday.

Then my eldest hit puberty.

I still hold to all those statements.  But it is also absolutely true that parenting a middle schooler is different from parenting a younger (or older) child.  In the first part of this series - Adolescents are Like Toddlers - I talked about how the rapid changes in physical growth associated with puberty mean that kids need lots of good food and uninterrupted sleep.  Let them eat junk and stay up late and they act like cranky toddlers.  Much of what we think about as 'typical' teen moodiness is caused by kids being tired and hungry.

In this piece, I want to talk about changes in adolescent cognition.  In many ways, middle schoolers think like stereotypical lawyers.  They like to argue.  They fit facts to their theories instead of theories to facts.  They anticipate your arguments and twist them in ways you never thought they could.  And they build arguments that just defy common sense.

Advances in brain science. During the past two decades, excellent research in developmental neuroscience has shown that kids' brains continue to change and grow during the second - and probably the third - decade of life.  One important area of change is the growth of areas of the brain associated with executive functioning.  These cogntive functions allow people to integrate multiple demands and competing stimuli, including reconciling the sometimes contradictory rational and emotional impulses we have.  As executive functioning improves, emotional decision-making becomes less dominant.  This continuing development is one reason that the US Supreme Court decided that teens are not fully culpable for terrible crimes and should not, therefore, be eligible for the death sentence. 

Unfortunately, like much good work in psychology and neuroscience, these findings are sometimes distorted by the media to fit a more dramatic storyline and our own existing prejudices.  In this case, the prejudice that teenagers are just plain crazy.  I have a collection of ads sitting on the bulletin board in front of my desk.  My favorite says:

Why do most 16-year-olds drive like they're missing part of their brain?  Because they are.

*Sigh*

Many of these ads, blogs, and media reports state baldly that teenagers think neither rationally nor well.

As a parent, I want to state unequivalently that this isn't the problem with middle schoolers.

They are so darn annoying because they think TOO WELL.  And boy, does that make them tough to argue with.

Gains in cognition.  Adolescents make 5 major gains in cognitive development as they move from elementary into middle school.

• They can think about possibilities
• They can think about abstract concepts
• Their metacognitive abilities improve (they can think about thinking)
• They can think multi-dimensionally, playing one idea off of another
• They can think relativistically, understanding things from different points of views.

Elementary school students can think in compex and logical ways about concrete objects.  Ask a fourth grader to describe their best friend and they will give you a detailed list of all the things that they do, they physical characteristics, and their likes and dislikes.

Middle schoolers, on the other hand, think more abstractly.  They will describe their best friends in terms of abstract qualities - artistic, rather than draws well, poetic, rather than likes to read.  In addition, especially as they get older, they can think about the sometimes contradictory nature of the world.  For example, an adolescent might describe himself as shy in new situations but outgoing and rowdy with people he knows well.  These new abilties are one reason that complicated games, like Dungeons and Dragons, Magic, and Pokemon, start to get popular among the middle school crowd.  Early adult fiction is much more nuanced than children's fiction.  And the Harry Potter books got much more complex and multi-dimensional as Harry moved from his first to 7th year at Hogwarts.

The Middle School Transition

During the transition from what mode of thinking abilities to the other, though, kids can trip up.

And that's right about at middle school.  And boy, can it be annoying.

Fitting facts to theory. One characteristic of transitional thought is the abiltity generate a new theory - thinking about possibilities.  When we get older, we generate hypotheses and then test them against other, alternative hypotheses.  Maybe we have time to go the movies?  Yes, but this, that, and the other thing might be better uses of our time. As we play out multiple scenarios, we change our original, tentative conclusion.

Middle school kids can get to step 1, but may not yet be ready to go on to step two. Instead of modifying the conclusion to fit the facts, they fit all facts to the conclusion.

• Mom, can we go the movies?
• Maybe, but you have homework to get done.
• You said maybe we could go yesterday, so I already made plans.
• I said we could go if your homework is done.  Is it?
• I just have a little.
• How much?  Oh my gosh, you have a huge project due tomorrow!
• It won't take that long.
• It looks like at least two hours worth of work.
• But the movie isn't that long.  I can do part of it in the car there and back.  And then I'll still have plenty of time.
• It will be 9:00 by the time we're home.  And you can't work in the car like that.
• You work in the car sometime!  And the movie will really help me with the project.  Besides, you said I need more time to relax and that I don't work efficiently when I'm stressed out and hyper.
• I don't think . . .
• I'll get up early.  There's lots of time before school.  You told me that maybe I should get up early and work then so I wouldn't stay up so late.  PLEEEEEEEEZ!

All of us do this sometimes.  But middle schoolers are particularly good at it.

In addition to the abiltity to fit facts to their theory, middle schoolers have two new skills that makes them particularly good at arguing.

They know what you're thinking.  Children are egocentric.  They know what they want and they think you want the same thing.  For example, they want a Sponge Bob vido game, so they know that's the perfect birthday present for you. 

As middle schoolers develop the ability to think of multiple perspectives at the same time, they can start to take your point of view.  They can anticipate the arguments you're going to make and come up with good counter-arguments ahead of time.  And they can take arguments you've made in the past - as in the stress argument above - and use it in ways you sure wouldn't. 

But you said them - that makes it hard to argue with.

Being able to anticipate what others will say and to play to that person's biases really helps adolescents argue more effectively.  And their willingness to ignore the logical inconsistencies in their own arguments - or to fail to see them - can make them really drive home arguments with an assurance that someone who is carefully considering all sides just can't.

Logic in the absence of facts.  A final strength that makes middle schoolers so maddening in an argument is that they can take a theory or logical argument and apply it with very little real knowledge of its limitations. 

One of the advantages that adults have in everyday cognition is that we know lots of facts.  We have experience - which, in the right context, can lead to wisdom.  On the positive side, that means that we can quickly and efficiently eliminate probably time-wasting side-channels.  Given a particular set of noises with our car, we can probably eliminate 2/3 of the causes just based on our past experience.

Kids don't have that knowledge.  What they're good at is taking a theory and trying to fit it into all the possible places it might apply.  Including lots of places it doesn't.  They are also good at generating many different theories for a given set of facts and not eliminating any of them.  How can they?  They don't have enough experience to knock out the unlikely possibilities.

The strength of adult cognition is being able to do some things very well and eliminate unlikely scenarios.  The strength of adolescent cognition is that sometimes those harebrained ideas they come up with really work.  And that's innovation.

In an argument, however, middle schoolers can often throw out a logical argument that can be contradicted by facts or by limitations about where a particular theory works and where it does't.  Unfortunately, as an adult arguing with that kid, you need to pull those facts out of your memory or to articulate those limitations.  And a lot of times they're things you just know, but have never really thought about.  Implicit knowledge.

Oh, and you have to do it fast, while they're arguing with you in the car, with the radio on and the cellphone ringing.

Adults sometimes do the same thing.  In their own area of expertise, everybody has a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't work.  You know the problems and frustrations that make what seems like it should be simple very complex.  Take the gulf oil spill.  Why don't they just drop a nuclear bomb down there and turn it all to glass?  Can't they just put in a big plug?  How can they not know what's going on?

You know the guy.  Why don't you just . . .

Nothing is so annoying as a know-it-all who just can't understand why you don't just do the obvious and make things right.  The problem with know-it-alls is that they don't know it all.  They see a simple solution because they lack full knowledge of the complexities that make the simple solution unworkable.

And that describes middle schoolers all over.  They have amazing logical abilities.  But they just don't know that much.

 

 

 

Dungeons & Dragons was the first hobby game I ever played, and the first module that I ever saw and lusted after was Ravenloft. So in spite of not having touched a D&D line product in over a decade, when saw that Wizards of the Coast were re–entering the boardgame market with a co–operative Ravenloft adventure game I was instantly intrigued. The kind folks at Wizards of the Coast, Europe, were good enough to whet my appetite further by indulging my request for a review copy which came a few days early, so I've already been lucky enough to play this ten times or so, plenty on which to form an opinion.

The very first time that I played this game, I was struck rapidly by two things. The first is that this quite possibly does the best job ever of capturing the spirit of those old–fashioned role–playing game dungeon crawls that were so much fun in the days of my youth. In spite of the fact that it has a decent amount of board game style strategic meat on its bones it really feels like a stripped down RPG session: each turn the heroes move and the dungeon unfurls slowly before them as they draw tiles from a stack and add them to the board. You then draw a monster card, to represent what appears from out of the gloom and attacks, following a pre–set AI routine printed on the card, and often an encounter card representing such things as events and traps. The players must work together to use their mixed abilities to defeat their foes and solve their problems and gain treasure cards in return and the whole is wrapped in a loosely binding plot thanks to one of the thirteen different scenarios that come with the game. You can tell the designers were aiming for this sort of effect thanks to the old–school flavour text that's supplied for one of the players to read out at the start of each scenario and at certain key events, just like the room descriptions that the DM was supposed to read in adventure modules.

And boy, did they ever succeed in that intention. It's partly thanks to the co–operative nature of the game that it gets this effect across, and here the co–operation feels like something natural instead of the feeling of forced jollity in what is normally a competitive medium that so pervades and spoils the majority of co–op titles.

The second is that the game is absolutely packed with really neat little mechanical twists that aim to get the most tactical and narrative mileage out of the simple rules. There's nothing mold–breaking involved here, just a real sense that people worked hard to do as much as the could with relatively little. The best example of this is the tile–based movement system which all monsters (and occasionally some of the heroes) use: rather than plotting at path across squares, this involves simply moving to a different tile, and this being a co–op game the players get to choose which square on the tile gets moved to. In a nutshell this sidesteps an array of potentially complex rules for plotting monster movement square–by–square while at the same time providing the backbone of tactical choice in the game since the precise positioning of the target on a tile can result in the powers of the monsters and the heroes having different results on the situation. It's a brilliantly stripped–down design that manages to simultaneously trim off all the excess fat that has historically so plagued dungeon crawl games whilst at the same time actually making use of that minimalism to improve the game experience.

Sadly the rules aren't all a bed of roses. The process of slimming down the rules has, unfortunately, resulted in a slew of minor rules ambiguities. It's unclear, for example, whether dungeon squares containing furniture like coffins or laboratory equipment are valid for movement or not. There's nothing that will bring the game crashing down round your ears and, usefully, co–op games by their very nature can make light work of bypassing rules loopholes so long as all the players agree on how to interpret the rules, but it's still a bit sad to see these sorts of problems in a game from such a major publisher, who certainly have the resources to playtest and iron out rules issues.

The low rules weight also means that some of the gothic flavour of the game is almost inevitably lost. Wraiths in this game don't drain levels or need magic weapons to hit them; they're just tough to kill and hand out terrifying amounts of damage. I think this is what's behind some of the accusations of blandness that I've seen levelled at the design. However I think this is pretty unfair: the designers have clearly worked hard to try to differentiate the monsters as much as possible from each other and you can really see this in the AI routines printed on each monster card that governs how they behave. Almost every conceivable point of difference has been worked out and utlilised to make sure that a skeleton is not quite the same as a zombie and so on. Personally I'm entirely comfortable with the level of detail that's been sacrificed in order to make this as fast playing and as accessible as possible. And given that it plays in around an hour, is simple enough for a primary school child to engage with (if not play effectively), and retains enough complexity to support thirteen scenarios, six super–monsters, and ten or so normal monsters plus traps, events, items and other effects I'd argue those sacrifices were well worth making.

The other thing that some commentators have described as bland is the artwork in the game. I have a mixed response to this. The dungeon tiles do look a bit generic but on the upside this leaves them interchangeable with future releases. The cards are, it must be said, a bit lacking. Only the monster cards have artwork on them and you really would have thought a company with the resources of Wizards of the Coast could find some stock artwork to use in this regard. It would certainly help you to feel that you'd found a cool item to see it pictured instead of just a line of text telling you that it gives you +1 to attack rolls. But really, to suggest a game that has such great miniatures as this one does as "bland" is just silly. They're the best sculpts I've seen outside of a Games Workshop title and there's tons of them in the box, the majority of them being unique figures rather than duplicates.

The light rules weight and the well–known nature of the license also leaves ample scope for both official and fan–generated extra content to be squeezed in. There are already a couple of extra scenarios you can download from the Wizards of the Coast site as well as plans for another game based on the same framework with interchangeable components called Wrath of Ashardalon which includes rules for campaigns, the only really major omission in this title. The game feels like a toolbox in a good way, not by providing you with lots of components that aren't covered by the rules, but by inviting the player to use their skill and imagination to expand the game in whatever direction they choose. Want to add some rules for items heroes can carry into the dungeon? Go ahead. Want to add some more monsters from your figure collection? Be my guest. I suspect there are expansions planned for this, waiting, as yet unannounced.

But frankly there's already plenty in the box to provide plenty of replay value off the bat. One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that each character can pick four or five powers unique to them, and while suggested combinations are offered, there's actually about twice as many to choose from, providing plenty of opportunity for exploring different approaches to different scenarios. The basic items in the treasure deck are supplemented by more powerful scenario specific items and by one–shot fortunes and blessings. And as well as traps the encounter deck boasts all kinds of cool stuff like atmospheric cackling skulls, to old–school dungeon favourites such as gray ooze all the way to bizarre effects that teleport heroes and monsters all round the dungeon. As ever the simple rules are made to work as hard as possible to provide one of the staple requirements of a good dungeon crawler: plenty of variety.

After all the good stuff, I do have one major gripe about the game and that is it's odd, unpredictable difficulty curve. This is a multi–faceted problem. For starters there's no guide as to how tough the various scenarios in the game are, and I can assure you that some are considerably more difficult than others. The characters are not balanced, with some looking distinctly more powerful than others. I remain unconvinced that the mechanics for increasing difficulty when more characters are in the game really works since it's reliant on more than one player drawing the same monster card, and that monster type then acts twice per turn. Not only is it random, but it's actually pretty unlikely to happen with ten–odd different monsters in the game and in any case I don't think it really makes up for the synergy of abilities you get having more characters playing together. There's also the fact that the game adds pressure to the players by making them get behind on their use of actions. Each player gets on action (an attack, for example) each turn and usually they'll reveal a monster on their turn. As long as the next player makes their attack roll and kills the monster the players stay in control: it's when they start missing and the actions needed to deal with the backlog start to pile up that things become hard to handle. And all the action checks in the game are handled by a twenty–sided dice of course, so it's quite possible to get a run of bad (or good) results in a row thanks to the flat probability curve of rolling a single dice, resulting in games that are ridiculously difficult (or easy).

That flat probability curve and all those checks for action success also mean that, obviously, there's a fairly high level of randomness in the game generally because to accomplish many actions in the game beyond moving, you need to roll the dice. There's also quite a lot to think about. I've already mentioned the tile–based movement and the variable character powers. There's also a lot of risk–based decisions such as whether you want to reveal a new tile – and a new monster – each turn or whether you care to risk taking an encounter instead, something you're forced to do if you fail to explore. If you do take it, you have the option of spending some of your hard–earned monster kills to cancel it and if you let it happen it might be a question of whether to take damage or suffer a different effect. The game is permeated with these sorts of "what–if" decisions. So, although there is meaningful choice in the game, those of you who came looking for a level of detailed tactics like that found in Descent or an Arkham Horror-like level of control will be disappointed. I actually think the game hits a really sweet spot in balancing skill and random elements, and it helps a lot that the game is so quick playing because it means that a trip into the dungeon plagued with ill luck feels more like a story with a bad ending than a waste of gaming time.

In a nutshell then, this is a really impressive re–entry into the board game market for the Dungeons & Dragons licence and one with a lot of mileage in front of it. Another major publisher in the business can't do anything but good for the hobby. My personal distaste for co–op games is well known but Castle Ravenloft has joined the extremely small shortlist of co–ops that have become regular visitors to my gaming table: no small feat in itself. Yet I can imagine it and its brethren returning again and again in the months to come.

D20 Source Dungeons & Dragons Blog has teamed up with The Le Games to give away a D&D PDF every day until Wednesday to celebrate the 36th anniversary of D&D. Yesterday’s offer was a free PDF copy of Treasures of Malevolent Might, a collection of 36 magic items including several...

[...]

Everyone knows that the only thing more embarrassing than your assortment of Dungeons and Dragons figurines is the collection of french fries and smashed peanut butter crackers that you’ve accumulated beneath the driver’s seat. Women dig a clean car, not as much as they dig a guy with hoards of cash, but at least you [...]

I have critisezed D&D in few posts. It is not a game for me, but meh, I am a rpg collector. And got this good opportunity to get two D&D books for my collection. So, here those are:Dungeons & Dragons 3. Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. I ...

[...]

I have critisezed D&D in few posts. It is not a game for me, but meh, I am a rpg collector. And got this good opportunity to get two D&D books for my collection. So, here those are:Dungeons & Dragons 3. Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. I ...

Pong, Space Invaders, Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Joust, Centipede, Tron, Dragon's Lair, and my personal favorite, Robotron 2084.

If you're a 30- or 40-something geek like me, you probably played video games as a kid. Not on the personal computer, which in the 70s and 80s was only in its infancy. I mean the big, hulking, stand-up video arcade machines. The ones that ate your allowance (or cafeteria milk money).

As I write about in the my recent article for the Christian Science Monitor "Video game museum gives arcade classics extra lives" (pasted below; or see print edition archived here), these games have had a powerful effect on an entire generation. And now that generation is all grown up, like with a lot of childhood or adolescent hobbies looked back on with the 20-20 hindsight of adulthood, these old school arcade games create nostalgia. We have money, we have desire, and we want our childhoods back. If you have kids of your own, that's another reason to dip into the days of 8-bit pixels and dim, humming, cave-like video arcades. The ones near my hometown were called The Space Center and The Dream Machine. Cool.

When generations reach middle age, there's a curious phenomenon: a nostalgia for the way things were kicks in. For me, the "way" was that pre-Mac, pre-iPhone, pre-iPod, pre-Internet world where people called each other on payphones and left notes in each other's lockers to communicate, made plans ahead of time, and had to meet in public, in person (gasp!) in order to play a video game. None of this hunkering down for hours at a time to immerse oneself in online games; these games of yore, like say Missile Command or cost a quarter or fifty cents, and for me anyway, they lasted about 10 minutes tops. The little Pac-Man or Space Invader was iconic, symbolic, crude. It was like a metaphor for a little you.

The draw of old video games, like old anything, is a desire feel closer to a unspoiled experience. As Henry Lowood says in my article, video game game nostalgia is about "stripping away the surface layers associated with modern games gives them the feeling of being closer to something we might call core game-play." Modern games are inordinately complex and require the mastery of bunches of buttons. The arcade game had maybe two or three buttons and a joystick. Sometimes just a joystick ---- a cave man bone tool compared to games like Gears of War or World of Warcraft. 

We want to be connected to that time when things were, yep, simpler. When we didn't have all these fancy 3D computer animation technologies that produced photorealistic environments. When you could register your initials on the top score list of your favorite game, and enjoy a moment of fame ... until the next person came along to knock you off the leader board.

 

Video game museum gives arcade classics extra lives

Nerd nirvana? It's a video game museum that doubles as an arcade.

By Ethan Gilsdorf, / Contributor 

posted August 5, 2010 at 1:54 pm EDT

Laconia, N.H. —

Downstairs at Funspot, the venerable amusement center here near the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, tourists arrive in waves to play air hockey, ride the bumper cars, and pump tokens into modern video games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Terminator Salvation.

But upstairs, the dim, cavelike American Classic Arcade Museum (ACAM) creates another reality. Period music – Toto, Men at Work, Duran Duran – trickles in, mixing with the electronic beeps, zaps, and chirps of machines arranged in long rows like a robotic army. Among this array of classic arcade games, the largest in the world, you'll see classics such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders, but also rare finds such as Quantum and even Pong, the only one still on public display and playable.

Here, time has screeched to a halt. Neither the games nor the music is younger than the final year of the Reagan administration.

Double Dragon came out in 1987, "around the time that things began to change," says Gary Vincent, the museum's president, who opened it in 1998 and grew the arcade's collection to some 280 video games. As the first nonprofit dedicated to preserving coin-op amusements, ACAM is a sort of living history museum of gaming culture.

"The games don't make much money," Mr. Vincent says. But money is hardly the point. Unlike at other museums, here you can touch. Every game on the floor is there to be played. And for 25 cents, the museum lets folks try to revive their old-school gaming mojo.

As gamers get older, there's been a resurging interest in arcade classics. This nostalgia trip hit the public consciousness with the 2007 documentary film "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," which offered a peek into the world of retro video game competitions. Since then, the subculture that exults these games has broadened beyond a dedicated few. Gradually, a movement to collect relics from the medium's history has gained traction. Academic institutions and individuals have begun archiving them. But preservation isn't simply a sentimental effort to relive people's digital childhoods. These games offer a unique window into the cultural and social impact of video games.

"Quite simply, digital games are a part of contemporary culture," says Henry Lowood, curator of Stanford University's History of Science and Technology Collections and Film and Media Collections, in an e-mail interview. "If we care about understanding our culture, we have to care about preserving its history, and games are a part of that history." Similar institutional efforts to gather video games and memorabilia are housed at the University of Texas at Austin and the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.

Mr. Lowood also spearheads the "game canon" project, a list of video games slated to be preserved by the Library of Congress. A committee of game developers and experts chose the first 10 games: from 1962's Spacewar! (considered to be the first computer game) to Tetris and Super Mario Bros. 3.

Conservation is also paramount for practical reasons: Arcade hardware is fragile. The games themselves were programmed into the circuit boards, and if those fail, the games die.

The preservation movement shows not only how far the technology has progressed, but also how much public perception of video games has changed. "This game generated its own 20-minute segment on '60 Minutes,' " says Vincent, standing in front of Death Race, one of the museum's crown jewels. The driving game involves cars running over "gremlins," which in their pixelated form looked like pedestrians. In its day it was vilified as much as heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons. With its blocky, stick-figure, white-on-black graphics, it now seems laughably primitive, and as tame as a hayride. "These days on PlayStation, it would be rated 'E for everyone,' " he jokes.

Many classic gamers are now in their 40s, and some still prefer playing in arcades over playing in their living rooms. Donald Hayes – whom Vincent calls "probably the best classic game player ever" – finds new Xbox games uninteresting. He is drawn to the "simplicity" of classics. "They don't depend on the graphics," says the software engineer from Salem, N.H. "The Xbox controller has, like, 20 buttons. The old games, it's a joystick and a couple of buttons."

Mr. Hayes holds several high-score world records, including being one of only six people to get a perfect score in arcade Pac-Man. He also holds records in Joust, Centipede, Millipede, Super Zaxxon, and several others. At Funspot's Annual International Classic Video Game Tournament, which draws between 150 and 175 competitors, Hayes defends his good name. Currently, he's training to reclaim his old Dig Dug and Frogger records. "There's a lot of work involved," Hayes says. For example, setting the Centipede record took him nine hours of continuous play; Dig Dug takes 12 to 15 hours. Hayes goes to Funspot once a month to practice. He also owns 12 arcade machines.

Another option for those interested in upping their old Ms. Pac-Man scores: Wii Virtual Console and Xbox Live Game Room, online services that let players enjoy classics such as Asteroids, Tron, and Missile Command at home. There's also a site called mamedev.org, whose "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator" reproduces games as faithfully as possible for the modern computer.

But what's lost in playing arcade games at home is the social experience. "You could go to the arcade and see your older brother's score from the night before," says Christopher Grant, editor in chief of the video game blog Joystiq and a member of the game canon committee. "When we're talking about game preservation, we're not just talking about the game. We need to preserve the player." Some home console games now have online leader boards, so that social experience is coming back.

There's also the camp that argues that a crucial game-playing experience disappeared when game designers began creating realistic, immersive game environments such as World of Warcraft. To Chris Kohler, video games editor at Wired.com and a devoted games collector, 8-bit-style games are easier to understand, more accessible, and don't require the dedication of a 3-D, first-person shooter game.

Mr. Kohler's Game|Life blog regularly lists the various Commodore 64 or Amiga cartridges he's unearthed at tag sales and thrift stores. "2-D wasn't archaic. It was in fact a superior way to design games. Or if not superior, a unique style that needs to be preserved." A new generation of programmers is answering this call and designing retro games that mimic the look and feel of these arcade games of yore.

"I am sure that for some retro-gamers, stripping away the surface layers associated with modern games gives them the feeling of being closer to something we might call core game-play," says Lowood.

So if these arcade games aren't necessarily about over-the-hill gamers trying to recapture their past arcade glory, perhaps they succeed in returning players to simpler purity. They even evoke a misplaced nostalgia for a time that a gamer may not have personally experienced: Mark Hazelton, age 24, of Sandwich, Mass., visited Funspot with his sister and niece for the third time in four days. "There are a lot of games here I grew up on," he says. "It's like nostalgia. All the new games are crazy-good-looking. But I like coming here. They even have Pong here from 1972. It's cool they have that."

© The Christian Science Monitor. All Rights Reserved. 

The "choose your own adventure" gamebook returns, and brings with it auto dice rolling

There seems to be no respite to the current Eighties revival. From the Ting Tings, garishly framed glasses and deck shoes, to casual football hooliganism, a global recession and Conservative Government, it seems we can’t escape similarities to that decade.

Even heroin is having a mini revival.

And, as they say, “if you can remember the 80s, you… still have nightmares about fluorescent leg warmers.”

But there’s one massive aspect of that period that hasn’t made much of a comeback; tabletop role-playing games.

In the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Runequest, and a whole smorgasbord of other RPGs, were to teenage boys what alcopops and underage sexual encounters are to today’s generation.

We didn’t need to go on stabbing sprees, we had fictional orcs to brawl. And, if we were really lucky (with our twenty-sided die) we might even have been treated to a description of a comely wench’s ample bosom, delivered by another teenage boy, in the guise of a Dungeon Master.

As good as role-playing sessions were, though, they took an awful lot of preparation. And you’d need a big collection of other similarly-minded geekagers to have a half-decent adventure.

That’s where Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks came in…

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Format

iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad

Price

?1.79

Where

iTunes

Back in 1982, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain hit bookstores and created a huge sensation. It was a cross between the Choose your own Adventure novels coming into the UK via the States (giving multiple options, and subsequent page numbers, after each chapter), and a role-playing game, with character stats and dice-rolling aplenty.

Its success spawned a run of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks that lasted for 59 separate titles and 13 years. Now it has found a new medium and audience in the guise of an iPhone and iPad app, and it’s not just a nostalgic look back for a grown-up geek, there’s proper gameplay in there too.

Keeping true to the original, the heart of the application, on both iPhone and iPad formats, is an ebook. The text is identical to the original paperback, as are the pics, albeit tarted up and coloured in. However, the dice rolling is integrated (shake the device and they spin across the screen), as is character management. And the choices at the end or during the chapter, including fight or flee, are hot links.

That’s really all there is to it. If you’re not a big reader, you won’t get on very well with TWOFM, if you are, there’s plenty of entertainment therein.

One criticism would be that there’s no auto mapping function. The book rather relies on you knowing where you are in the dungeon at any given time, and avid fans back then will have had a pencil and graph paper to hand. When you’re on a train now though, you’re not likely to get out an exercise book and plunge into a world of cartography, with your iPhone in one hand, quill in the other. Considering the technology, it would’ve been simple to have created an in-game auto map as you go.

Nonetheless, mapping issues aside, this is an excellent app to rekindle the love for traditional role-playing games, and with another two books in the series already available too, Citadel of Chaos and Deathtrap Dungeon, let’s hope it continues to build.

Now, where did I put my lead figurines?

Tags: Phones iPhone iPad iPhone 4 iPhone 3GS iPod Touch Fighting Fantasy The Warlock of Firetop Mountain AOTD App of the day

     

APP OF THE DAY: Fighting Fantasy - The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (iPhone / iPad) originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:00:00 +0100

Combo video specialist Maj premiered two new productions at Evo 2010 last weekend, one of which was this Super Fireball Battle video, a collection of creative ranged attacks from dozens of fighting games, from Street Fighter IV to Tekken 3. I love that Kim vs. Terry bit at 01:04!

He also debuted "Style Exhibition V.One", which features seven minutes of clips of extended combos -- some knocking away a full life bar. You can watch that video, which includes an awesome Dungeons & Dragons comb (around the 5:50 mark), after the break.

Maj notes that while these are tool-assisted gameplay exhibition, no cheats, hacks, or game-altering devices were used for the sequences. You can watch the second video after the break!

[Via Capcom Unity]

How much "me" is too much "me"? Does the reader care to see the places and people evoked along a journey through the lens of the personal pronoun "I"? At what point does "Ethan does this" "Ethan does that" annoy the reader?

That is the question I wonder about, worry over, and balance in my mind as I write a travel story, memoir or personal essay (and teach my students how to hopefully do this successfully as well).

After the success of Eat Pray Love, memoir is hot again. But the form, and the tradition, is a bruised, battered and beleaguered, particularly in the post-Million Little Pieces, reality TV, web cam era. A new book, Vanishing Point: Not A Memoir (Graywolf, 191 pp,, $16.00), sort of kick memoir into the grave for good.

Not that Ander Monson has done anything particularly heinous. Monson isn't really out to smash conventions or hammer manifestos on the doors of academe.

But the very admission, almost challenge, put forth in the subtitle to this new book, Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, reminds us that anything nonfiction and told from that precarious, first person singular pronoun --- what Monson calls "'I's asserting themselves and their claims to truth"--- (particularly any Holocaust or raised by wolves memoir) is not to be trusted.

The solution of Vanishing Point is not to offer a narrative. The book is a collection of essays, musings and considerations. We have a kind of memoir-by-kaleidoscope here, but also a discussion about the impossible, infuriating task of writing a memoir. Monson remains a moving target, but it's a hoot trying to track him down.

In an early essay in the book called "Voir Dire," Monson is the foreman for a trial of a defendant charged with bank fraud; prior to the trial, he judged a nonfiction book contest. "Listen to what happened to me," he sees each manuscript imploring. "They suppose their 'I's are solid, inviolable, made up of evidence and verifiable memory." Here, Monson makes us see the unexpected parallels between the legal system and writerly expression. Elsewhere, he connects the band New Order with the funeral of President Ford.

It's a highly self-conscious book, and perhaps this is how Monson solves his problem. By admitting that it's hard to tell "the truth" of a persona story, he's let himself off the hook to tell his story straight. Each of his assertions is hedged with asides, retractions, tangents, found objects, lists, asterisks, side notes, and typographical tricks. "You no longer have to be notable to write a memoir and have it read," one footnote insists. Then, later in the book, as if to prove or make fun of the point, the essay "Solipsism" begins with the word "me" repeated 1,003 times. Three chapters use a technique called "Assembloir"; stealing lines from some 85 others memoirs, he slaps them together to propose a memoir ars poetica. Assemble + memoir = assembloir. The chapter called "Ander Alert" is an astute meditation on Internet fame. Monson discovers a Wikipedia page about him, but realizes it's slated for deletion due to "lack of notability." So he seeks a "champion, someone to come to my electronic wikirescue." Not LOL funny, but clever.

The search takes him to other people named Ander, and other selves within himself--- "editor, teacher, writer, job hunter, disc golfer, lawn mower, husband, douchebag, authoritarian, ironist, Dungeon Master, etc." He finds new versions of himself on MySpace, Facebook, even playing Dungeons & Dragons. (Speaking of D&D, "Geas" uses the death of Gary Gygax, the game's co-founder, as an occasion to boldly suggest that "the rise of the memoir" --- and sexual fantasy and psychotherapy ---"correlates with the rise of role-playing games.") 

Perhaps the problem with memoir is now that everyone can be author, have a blog, create a platform, record a podcast, push a version of their "self." Certainly the Facebook status update and Twitter tweet is a kind of minimalist, haiku-like memoir. One can only imagine other and yet unseen ways for people to tell stories of themselves as new technologies and new cool Internet tools and websites appear.

Awash in blogs, YouTube, and Doritos, Monson finds that his "I is a solo I in the middle of thousands of these Is." His "I" is infinitively scaleable." His "I" is also exhausted. Which leads him to admit, "I have wanted to vanish for a very long time."

But with Google able to search us 24/7, the vanishing point for each of us recedes further and further into the horizon.

 

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.

 

 

 

 

 

Television cliche wiki TV Tropes has an ever-expanding collection of common gimmicks and genre conventions that will be familiar to players of tabletop roleplaying games. (Be warned: TV Tropes is rather addictive, so expect to spend several hours clicking links.) TV Tropes are especially useful for Dungeon Mastering ideas. One such trope is Schrodinger’s Gun, a [...]

Even as soccer’s World Cup verges on taking over the planet’s sports consciousness for a full month, a vastly smaller (and infinitely stranger) international footballing event took place last week on the Maltese island of Gozo. (Don’t feel bad, geographers—I had to look the place up, too.) The VIVA World Cup featured teams representing global powerhouses like Occitania, Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In last Saturday’s final, Padania defeated Iraqi Kurdistan by a score of 1 to 0.

What? Well, exactly. The VIVA World Cup, founded in 2006, basically exists to provoke puzzlement and curiosity. Unlike FIFA’s 32-team extravaganza featuring nothing but boring, old-fashioned nation-states (and England), the VIVA championship is open to unrecognized nations, loosely organized ethnicities, and language groups unknown to soccer’s conventional structures.

After just four years, the Cup has established an eccentric, low-tech profile of its own:

Who are these non-countries? The Two Sicilies is (are? were?) a Southern Italian region synonymous with a Naples-based Bourbon kingdom that folded in the 19^th Century. (The Sicilies squad no doubt engages in a fierce rivalry with fellow VIVA entrant Padania, which represents a collection of Northern Italian provinces.) Occitania comprises regions of France home to a medieval Mediterranean dialect. Iraqi Kurdistan perhaps comes closest to being a so-called “real” country, with its longstanding (but controversial) autonomous status within Iraq. The Sami people from northern Scandinavia sent a powerful team to previous VIVA Cups but did not participate this time around.

So what should we make of this odd simultaneous exercise in soccer and geopolitical Dungeons and Dragons?

On the one hand, the VIVA World Cup is—on its own somewhat humble level—a serious competitive event. Many players who took the field in Gozo earn their keep with professional or semi-professional club teams. As a spectacle, it shared at least some commonalities with the “real” World Cup, such as awkward song-and-dance numbers. The tournament has even known its own share of political controversy—the Padania team is associated, at least in some minds, with Italy’s right-wing Northern League party; and Iraqi Kurdistan has hopes to host the next VIVA Cup, hopes that tie fairly explicitly to the region’s aspirations for greater autonomy. On the more benign side, like its big brother in South Africa, the Gozo event fed local development and promotional goals, such as the small island’s efforts to brand itself as an eco-tourism destination.

And on the other hand, this odd little tournament simply serves as an imaginative, even romantic antidote to the glitz and media hyper-power of the official World Cup. (Personally, I would like to see such American alterna-nations such as Cascadia, the Second Vermont Republic, and Texas field teams in future VIVA Cups. Perhaps Texas could recruit native son Clint Dempsey—a useful player.)

Held on an endearingly small scale, this gathering of football outsiders serves as a reminder that not every sporting event needs to be a logistical juggernaut. After four installments, the VIVA World Cup has become a fixture on the bizarre end of the international soccer world—and proof, if any were needed, that the world of sports holds no end of surprises.

I realized the other day that while I've been making a concerted effort to make my way through piles of magazines, books, and other vintage papers top share on Branded, I haven't really made a dent in my cartoon collection either.  There are a lot of shows that I loved growing up, as well as a ton of others that I remember fondly, that are just sitting on my DVD shelves begging to be written about.  I think I'm going to try and correct that over the coming year.

Today I want to talk about one of the shows that I was so excited about as a kid, I'd speed home on my bike as fast as I could each day afraid I'd miss an episode.  As I careened home at light speed, I'd literally jump off the bike, letting it fall into a crumpled heap, and then I'd sprint into the house past my mom and any potential waiting snack to flip on the TV so that I wouldn't miss the opening credit sequence of the Silverhawks.  No joke, as my mom wandered off to close the front door that I'd left wide open, I'd be almost screaming "Tally Hawk!" at the top of my lungs along with the Silverhawks theme song as it played out on the TV before me.

For some reason I have some very vivid memories of actually singing along to the Silverhawks theme song, much more so than any of the other cartoons I used to watch after school.   I'm not sure exactly what it was about the song, but it combined with the breathtakingly pretty animation must have been pure sugary eye-candy for me as a kid.  Though there were anime overtones to shows like G.I. Joe, Dungeons and Dragons, and Jem (which were all animated by the Japanese studio Toei), it was with the Rankin/Bass cartoons that I feel like I really got my first taste of Japanese influenced animation.  Aside from the well rendered illustration in the cels, these RB productions, Silverhawks and ThunderCats in particular, were also edited with a skilled eye towards action.   At the time I'd never seen characters that were so dynamic and fast.  The animation studio responsible for these Rankin/Bass productions was the Pacific Animation Company, which had alumni like Hayao Miyazaki and some of the animators at Studio Ghibli, so the talent pool was certainly high quality.

Much like its sister show, the ThunderCats, the Silverhawks series opens with a two part origin story titled, oddly enough, Origin Story & Journey to Limbo.  Honestly, there isn't much to these first two Peter Lawrence scripted episodes aside from a lot of story setup where we're introduced to practically every reoccurring character in the cast (good and evil) and their capabilities.  The first episode is framed as a status report filed by Commander Stargazer who keeps watch over the edge of the galaxy in the space station Hawk Haven (odd because the Silverhawks proper haven't been introduced and there's no explanation as to why there is an avian theme.)  His report centers on MonStar, the most unruly and probably the craziest mob boss in the galaxy, who has just broken out of an intergalactic prison and has started putting his gang of ruthless criminals back together.  Stargazer is requesting help in dealing with the menace when we switch perspective to Earth where a group of soldiers and an alien from the planet of the mimes are in the process of being retrofitted with cybernetic enhancements so they can both combat MonStar and survive the trip to Limbo where the series takes place.  Calling upon the tagline of the series, an alien scientist (in his best Bela Lugosi impression) states that to make the trip to Limbo the group must be "…partly metal and partly real..."  This is actually a phrase that's used ad nauseam in these first couple of episodes, to a point where it's almost comical.

As far as design and concepts go, I think these Rankin/Bass cartoons are the culmination of five years worth of industry expansion and benefit from the freedom animation studios were gifted with by first run syndication and the softer intervening hand of government "regulations".  In the explosion of televised cartoon creativity, the Silverhawks and ThunderCats are in my opinion, the resulting mushroom cloud; big, beautiful, and airy.  The one aspect where I think Silverhawks really excels is in the iconic character design of the series, in particular with its villains.  Rankin/Bass used very similar templates with their shows, but the archetypes they chose, in particular those of the villains, were flat out insane and unlike any other cartoons.

MonStar is just crackling with energy and truly frightening aspects, from his mane of wild, flowing black and red hair, to the jagged edges of his twisted mouth and dangerously sharp teeth.   Add to this his black body suit, shiny red chest plating, imposing eye-patch, and his wicked sharp fingernails and you have the makings of a truly scary villain.   But that's just one half of the character's design as the Rankin/Bass villains tend to have two forms, one that plots and schemes and a second outfitted for battle.   Using the fiery rays of the Moonstar of Limbo, MonStar can transform into a formidable evil knight with organic red armor platting and spikes all over his body.   His original appearance is mimicked in the armor design with sharp spikes jutting out of his head like the character's hair and beard, a row of interlocking spikes for teeth, and a black star over his left eye.   This secondary design also mimics the metal bodies of the Silverhawks, which seems to be outfitted for self-contained sojourns into space (even including rocket boosters in his elbows for propulsion.)

This process of transformation is so tangible and visceral.  You can almost feel how disturbingly painful it is as the skin and hair is literally ripped from MonStar’s body while it turns into his armor.   His screams of rage, pain and glee are truly insane, taking the typical megalomania of cartoon villains to another realm entirely.   As a kid, and even now as an adult, I found it completely and intoxicatingly riveting.   No other cartoon villains come even close to matching the ferocity and downright freakiness of MonStar (except Mum-Ra from the TunderCats, which again is also Rankin/Bass), though he's certainly rooted in the same traditions.   Not only his he visually imposing just by himself, but he also has an indentured, intergalactic steed, a giant squid named Sky Runner who goes through a similar transformation process (initiated by MonStar firing a pink "Light Star" from his eye) that also seems to speak to the transformation of Cringer into Battle Cat on the Filmation He-Man cartoon.   Sure, Skeletor had Panthor, and Cobra Commander had Scrap Iron and Major Bludd, but none of these cartoon villains ever had to intimidate and force their henchmen into subservience.

MonStar runs his mob out of a gnarly castle located deep within a planetoid, which looks like a cross between a giant spiraling drill bit and a torture device.   The set design is wonderful and creepy, in particular MonStar's throne, which is surrounded by the picking fingers of some rusty machinery that resembles an overturned spider.  When MonStar initiates his transformation sequence, the arms curl upwards creating a sort of star shaped filter for the Moonstar rays to shine through.  Also, on a side note, in another bit of crazy over the top design, to catch the rays of the Moonstar, MonStar's planetoid needs to be repositioned. His henchman, Yes-Man, operates the controls of some ginormous booster lasers that shift the entire planetoid into the Moonstar's beams which just seems crazily over the top…

Continuing along with the superb character designs are MonStar's eight main henchmen.   First up there's the sickeningly loyal afore-mentioned Yes-Man, a snake-like alien with a dour expression and a penchant for saying "Yes boss…" to every command.  With his curving spine and head drooping down below his shoulder line he comes off as a completely slimy character that will turn on you at a second's notice.   Yes-Man, like most of the characters are one note, but there's a purity to there simplistic design that makes them not come off as interchangeable.

Next we have the generically-named Buzz-Saw, who is a robot with launch-able circular saw blades for hands (he also has them on his shoulders, as well as one adorning his head like a Mohawk.)  Though I'll get into it a little more when I discuss the second episode, Buzz-Saw, though sentient, is a weirdly disposable character who gets blown up more often than simply defeated.  I think it's really odd to have this type of dynamic with a character, even if it is a robot.  On a separate note, we have Mumbo Jumbo, a fire-breathing robotic Minotaur.  Since his character design is much more organic with his animalistic features and body, I'd be willing to bet that he doesn't fit into that same disposable camp as Buzz-Saw.  I wonder if this sort of nonchalance towards robotic destruction stems from the depiction of C3P0 in Star Wars, in particular the scenes in Empire where he's blasted into pieces.   Though it should have come off as disturbing, it was more comedic because he not only survived, but goofily complained for the rest of the film.

There's also Windhammer, a pale blue-skinned warrior with a giant tuning fork that he uses to control cosmic weather (meteors, wind, lightening, etc.)   I think it's interesting that the artists and writers of the show chose an almost god-like theme for his design.  He's decked out very simply in a raggedy tunic, which with his flowing hair and Thor-like tuning fork really evokes a the design of a Roman or Greek god.   Again, sort of like the general design of Mumbo Jumbo, Windhammer comes off very organic in a very inorganic futuristic setting.  On the other hand we have Mo-Lec-U-Lar who has the oddest looking design of the bunch.   He's resembles an atom, with bulbous protons and electrons, and can shape-shift into other forms, but for all intents and purposes he looks like one of the Fruit of the Loom characters.  I'm not a huge fan of his design as it's a bit too bulky and feels out of place with the rest of the series' design elements.

Conceptually the strangest of the mob is Poker Face, a slick looking cyborg with slot machine eyes and a tuxedo.  I think it's strange that his design is so much more comedic than the rest of his counterparts, in particular when compared to MonStar.  Stealing a bit of the character design of Slythe from ThunderCats is Hardware, a squat reptilian alien who is a master engineer and weapons maker.   Last, but not least and probably my favorite, is Melodia, the new-wave musician who can literally create havoc with her futuristic laser keytar.  Also as a quick aside, Maggie Wheeler provided the voice of Melodia.  She's probably best known for portraying Janice, the woman with the single most annoying voice known to mankind on Friends.   Anyway, what really jumps out at me is that the artists and writers truly exhibited the idea that nothing was off the table when designing some of these characters.   For example, Melodia fires lasers from her keytar that resembles a long string of pink electric sheet music, complete with musical notes and a jamming soundtrack to boot.   Typically that's the sort of thing that works well on a comic book page, but would be really difficult to pull of in animation, though I think they do it well.

I think I'll end this here and pick up with the heroes, as well as more of the design and conceptual elements when I get into episode 2 later in the week.

I realized the other day that while I've been making a concerted effort to make my way through piles of magazines, books, and other vintage papers top share on Branded, I haven't really made a dent in my cartoon collection either.  There are a lot of shows that I loved growing up, as well as a ton of others that I remember fondly, that are just sitting on my DVD shelves begging to be written about.  I think I'm going to try and correct that over the coming year.

Today I want to talk about one of the shows that I was so excited about as a kid, I'd speed home on my bike as fast as I could each day afraid I'd miss an episode.  As I careened home at light speed, I'd literally jump off the bike, letting it fall into a crumpled heap, and then I'd sprint into the house past my mom and any potential waiting snack to flip on the TV so that I wouldn't miss the opening credit sequence of the Silverhawks.  No joke, as my mom wandered off to close the front door that I'd left wide open, I'd be almost screaming "Tally Hawk!" at the top of my lungs along with the Silverhawks theme song as it played out on the TV before me.

For some reason I have some very vivid memories of actually singing along to the Silverhawks theme song, much more so than any of the other cartoons I used to watch after school.   I'm not sure exactly what it was about the song, but it combined with the breathtakingly pretty animation must have been pure sugary eye-candy for me as a kid.  Though there were anime overtones to shows like G.I. Joe, Dungeons and Dragons, and Jem (which were all animated by the Japanese studio Toei), it was with the Rankin/Bass cartoons that I feel like I really got my first taste of Japanese influenced animation.  Aside from the well rendered illustration in the cels, these RB productions, Silverhawks and ThunderCats in particular, were also edited with a skilled eye towards action.   At the time I'd never seen characters that were so dynamic and fast.  The animation studio responsible for these Rankin/Bass productions was the Pacific Animation Company, which had alumni like Hayao Miyazaki and some of the animators at Studio Ghibli, so the talent pool was certainly high quality.

Much like its sister show, the ThunderCats, the Silverhawks series opens with a two part origin story titled, oddly enough, Origin Story & Journey to Limbo.  Honestly, there isn't much to these first two Peter Lawrence scripted episodes aside from a lot of story setup where we're introduced to practically every reoccurring character in the cast (good and evil) and their capabilities.  The first episode is framed as a status report filed by Commander Stargazer who keeps watch over the edge of the galaxy in the space station Hawk Haven (odd because the Silverhawks proper haven't been introduced and there's no explanation as to why there is an avian theme.)  His report centers on MonStar, the most unruly and probably the craziest mob boss in the galaxy, who has just broken out of an intergalactic prison and has started putting his gang of ruthless criminals back together.  Stargazer is requesting help in dealing with the menace when we switch perspective to Earth where a group of soldiers and an alien from the planet of the mimes are in the process of being retrofitted with cybernetic enhancements so they can both combat MonStar and survive the trip to Limbo where the series takes place.  Calling upon the tagline of the series, an alien scientist (in his best Bela Lugosi impression) states that to make the trip to Limbo the group must be "…partly metal and partly real..."  This is actually a phrase that's used ad nauseam in these first couple of episodes, to a point where it's almost comical.

As far as design and concepts go, I think these Rankin/Bass cartoons are the culmination of five years worth of industry expansion and benefit from the freedom animation studios were gifted with by first run syndication and the softer intervening hand of government "regulations".  In the explosion of televised cartoon creativity, the Silverhawks and ThunderCats are in my opinion, the resulting mushroom cloud; big, beautiful, and airy.  The one aspect where I think Silverhawks really excels is in the iconic character design of the series, in particular with its villains.  Rankin/Bass used very similar templates with their shows, but the archetypes they chose, in particular those of the villains, were flat out insane and unlike any other cartoons.

MonStar is just crackling with energy and truly frightening aspects, from his mane of wild, flowing black and red hair, to the jagged edges of his twisted mouth and dangerously sharp teeth.   Add to this his black body suit, shiny red chest plating, imposing eye-patch, and his wicked sharp fingernails and you have the makings of a truly scary villain.   But that's just one half of the character's design as the Rankin/Bass villains tend to have two forms, one that plots and schemes and a second outfitted for battle.   Using the fiery rays of the Moonstar of Limbo, MonStar can transform into a formidable evil knight with organic red armor platting and spikes all over his body.   His original appearance is mimicked in the armor design with sharp spikes jutting out of his head like the characters hair and beard, a row of interlocking spikes for teeth, and a black star over his left eye.   This secondary design also mimics the metal bodies of the Silverhawks, which seems to be outfitted for self-contained sojourns into space (even including rocket boosters in his elbows for propulsion.)

This process of transformation is so tangible and visceral.  You can almost feel how disturbingly painful it is as the skin and hair is literally ripped from MonStar’s body while it turns into his armor.   His screams of rage, pain and glee are truly insane, taking the typical megalomania of cartoon villains to another realm entirely.   As a kid, and even now as an adult, I found it completely and intoxicatingly riveting.   No other cartoon villains come even close to matching the ferocity and downright freakiness of MonStar (except Mum-Ra from the TunderCats, which again is also Rankin/Bass), though he's certainly rooted in the same traditions.   Not only his he visually imposing just by himself, but he also has an indentured, intergalactic steed, a giant squid named Sky Runner who goes through a similar transformation process (initiated by MonStar firing a pink "Light Star" from his eye) that also seems to speak to the transformation of Cringer into Battle Cat on the Filmation He-Man cartoon.   Sure, Skeletor had Panthor, and Cobra Commander had Scrap Iron and Major Bludd, but none of these cartoon villains ever had to intimidate and force their henchmen into subservience.

MonStar runs his mob out of a gnarly castle located deep within a planetoid, which looks like a cross between a giant spiraling drill bit and a torture device.   The set design is wonderful and creepy, in particular MonStar's throne, which is surrounded by the picking fingers of some rusty machinery that resembles an overturned spider.  When MonStar initiates his transformation sequence, the arms curl upwards creating a sort of star shaped filter for the Moonstar rays to shine through.  Also, on a side note, in another bit of crazy over the top design, to catch the rays of the Moonstar, MonStar's planetoid needs to be repositioned. His henchman, Yes-Man, operates the controls of some ginormous booster lasers that shift the entire planetoid into the Moonstar's beams which just seems crazily over the top…

Continuing along with the superb character designs are MonStar's eight main henchmen.   First up there's the sickeningly loyal afore-mentioned Yes-Man, a snake-like alien with a dour expression and a penchant for saying "Yes boss…" to every command.  With his curving spine and head drooping down below his shoulder line he comes off as a completely slimy character that will turn on you at a second's notice.   Yes-Man, like most of the characters are one note, but there's a purity to there simplistic design that makes them not come off as interchangeable.

Next we have the generically-named Buzz-Saw, who is a robot with launch-able circular saw blades for hands (he also has them on his shoulders, as well as one adorning his head like a Mohawk.)  Though I'll get into it a little more when I discuss the second episode, Buzz-Saw, though sentient, is a weirdly disposable character who gets blown up more often than simply defeated.  I think it's really odd to have this type of dynamic with a character, even if it is a robot.  On a separate note, we have Mumbo Jumbo, a fire-breathing robotic Minotaur.  Since his character design is much more organic with his animalistic features and body, I'd be willing to bet that he doesn't fit into that same disposable camp as Buzz-Saw.  I wonder if this sort of nonchalance towards robotic destruction stems from the depiction of C3P0 in Star Wars, in particular the scenes in Empire where he's blasted into pieces.   Though it should have come off as disturbing, it was more comedic because he not only survived, but goofily complained for the rest of the film.

There's also Windhammer, a pale blue-skinned warrior with a giant tuning fork that he uses to control cosmic weather (meteors, wind, lightening, etc.)   I think it's interesting that the artists and writers of the show chose an almost god-like theme for his design.  He's decked out very simply in a raggedy tunic, which with his flowing hair and Thor-like tuning fork really evokes a the design of a Roman or Greek god.   Again, sort of like the general design of Mumbo Jumbo, Windhammer comes off very organic in a very inorganic futuristic setting.  On the other hand we have Mo-Lec-U-Lar who has the oddest looking design of the bunch.   He's resembles an atom, with bulbous protons and electrons, and can shape-shift into other forms, but for all intents and purposes he looks like one of the Fruit of the Loom characters.  I'm not a huge fan of his design as it's a bit too bulky and feels out of place with the rest of the series' design elements.

Conceptually the strangest of the mob is Poker Face, a slick looking cyborg with slot machine eyes and a tuxedo.  I think it's strange that his design is so much more comedic than the rest of his counterparts, in particular when compared to MonStar.  Stealing a bit of the character design of Slythe from ThunderCats is Hardware, a squat reptilian alien who is a master engineer and weapons maker.   Last, but not least and probably my favorite, is Melodia, the new-wave musician who can literally create havoc with her futuristic laser keytar.  Also as a quick aside, Maggie Wheeler provided the voice of Melodia.  She's probably best known for portraying Janice, the woman with the single most annoying voice known to mankind on Friends.   Anyway, what really jumps out at me is that the artists and writers truly exhibited the idea that nothing was off the table when designing some of these characters.   For example, Melodia fires lasers from her keytar that resembles a long string of pink electric sheet music, complete with musical notes and a jamming soundtrack to boot.   Typically that's the sort of thing that works well on a comic book page, but would be really difficult to pull of in animation, though I think they do it well.

I think I'll end this here and pick up with the heroes, as well as more of the design and conceptual elements when I get into episode 2 later in the week.

Recently I had purchased the Monster Manual II for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition and have mixed feelings about it. Overall, I feel that it is a good addition to my collection, but there are a few things holding it back from being all that it could be. First, I will start off with the [...]

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Every gamer loves his canned and bottled beverages. Whether its Mountain Dew or Jack Daniel’s, we’ve never met someone that has a penchant for gaming who avoided processed drinks. Still, every gamer has his or her own drink of choice and sometimes that drink of choice isn’t exactly the most… shall we say “dwarven”… of beverage selections. Believe it or not, we do have individuals on our staff that love to play through their favorite MMO with a nice cup of hot cocoa in hand.

So how does a gamer hide his love of the frou-frou drink? With a World of Warcraft stein! Of course, there are lots of other reasons to get one of the epically emblazoned, three pound monsters if you have the money to spare, but the ZAM staff thought it would be reasonable to check out each of the Taverncraft products and help discover the item that’s best for you!

We've examined the steins from Taverncraft's Epic Collection along with their Tankard O' Terror replica, broken them down, and have selected our own favorites out of the entire mix! Read on for our final talley on each product!

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To start, we thought we’d pull out the stein that sticks closest to the current events transpiring in the actual World of Warcraft: the Rise of the Lich King. Just like the rest of the Epic Collection steins, Rise of the Lich King stands over 10” tall, is a meaty three pounds, and shows off a lovely pewter lid.

But you could’ve gotten all that from the website break down, right? What we can tell you, after looking face-to-stein at the Lich King’s searing gaze, is that the vessel is rather impressive and – to be honest – quite horrifying (in a good way) to look at. Along with the Lich King, what appear to be Sindragosa and Ick make featured appearances on the stein, along with several general monsters from the Lich King’s scourge forces. On the bottom of the stein is the standard 3 Point Entertainment and Blizzard Entertainment branding, which *could* come in handy if you get so inebriated (from the huge size of the stein) that you forget what the mighty stoneware mug is actually called. Also assisting the more intoxicated gamers is a fantastic pewter lid, which features carved detailing of Azeroth, some runic symbols, and the memorable "W" from our favorite game.

Unfortunately, this stein is isn't quite perfect. While the ZAM editors could never paint as well as the magnificent Alex Horley, this stein just doesn’t have the same sort of clean lines and iconic characterization that can be seen on the other steins in the Epic Collection. Yes, the Lich King is emblazoned on the front. Yes, he has several of his top lackeys surrounding him. But Alex could have done so much more! Where’s the actual citadel in this picture? What about the Frozen Throne? Perhaps he could’ve used the mug to tell the story of Arthas – albeit a much smaller version – rather than displaying the Lich King’s ugly cronies. Or he could’ve featured the Lich King alone, standing just as he does when he calls forth Sindragosa.

But, the Rise of the Lich King stein does a number of things well to counterbalance some of the disappointments in the actual image. The handle scores a lot of points by being a nice ergonomically rounded handhold rather than the clunkier handles that appear on the Horde and Alliance mugs. The base has quite a bit of character itself, with the macabre death’s head skulls (fanged at that!) wrapped around the bottom. The coloring on the piece is also quite nice, despite the fact that the artist had to work from a selection of grays and blues and whites. And, as with all the Epic Collection steins, the Rise of the Lich King can hold 28 oz. of fluid (over two soda cans!) before you’ll have to worry about spilling. And that’s what the lid is for…

Taking all of the above into account, the Rise of the Lich King stein is this editor’s least favorite stein in the entire Epic Collection. While it certainly has its merits, between the artwork and the lack of truly iconic characters (besides the Lich King) we couldn’t put the Lich King stein high on our list. Thankfully, our search for the best Taverncraft stein gets much, much more difficult next week, so make sure you check back in with us then! And, if you're interested in learning more about the steins, you can find them at WoWsteins.com or over at our sister site!

 

Dragons have always been able to inspire awe in the imaginations of men and women. From the Middle Ages onward, we’ve been fascinated with these mighty lizards, intertwining them into our religions and cultures in a way that ensures we’ll always have some form of the beasts integrated into our lives. Thus, it comes as no surprise that dragons are also some of the most popular creatures found in today’s massively multiplayer online games. Dungeons and Dragons, EverQuest, Ultima Online and still other games have created their own dragon myths, each playing off the game before to enhance or enliven their players.

Since 2004, World of Warcraft has continued the tradition of the dragons, showcasing their own twist on these epic tales and creating their own thick-scaled beasts. The greatest of these creatures are known as the Great Dragonflights with the others below them are simply called dragonflights. They are majestic and monstrous, horrifying and honorable all at once.

With these details in mind, we turn our attention towards our World of Warcraft Stein of the Week, the Charge of the Great Dragonflights. Just like the Rise of the Lich King stein, the dragon-based stein weighs in at a hefty three pounds, has a highly detailed pewter lid and is just over 10 inches tall.

However, there’s much more to the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein than its simple specs. Only when you heft the Dragonflights stein aloft for the first time do you truly get a sense of the fantastic vision of the Charge of the Great Dragonflights. As you read in our previous review of the Rise of the Lich King stein, there were a number of elements that we thought were less than perfect, even if the entire stein was still quite well-crafted. The Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein carries none of these flaws.

The exclusive artwork, crafted by James Zhang, carries all of the weight of each of the Dragonflights’ Aspects. Alexstrasza, Deathwing, Nozdormu, Malygos and Ysara, or at least some form of similar representations, are all accounted for on the stein, showcasing the Red, Black, Bronze, Blue and Green dragonflights. Each of the five dragons is phenomenally rendered in fine-quality stoneware, featuring clean lines, and each of the dragons has an extraordinary amount of detail wrapped into its form. While you can’t really tell from the pictures on the Taverncraft website, each of the details on the stein is raised to some degree. Wings, blasts of fire, all of it cannot only be seen, but touched and felt as well.

While the Rise of the Lich King stein also had these raised details, the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein has lines on the stein that are cleaner and much more focused on the detailing of what’s going on in the painting. Some of this could possibly be attributed to Zhang’s artwork, which focuses more on larger characters rather than trying to pack a variety of characters onto one stein. The natural coloring of the dragons also lends itself well to the stein, giving it a dynamic look that eludes the Lich King stein.

On to other details! The base of the Dragonflight stein is decent, but it doesn’t have quite the amount of detailing that can be found in the Lich King stein. Rather than sporting a wrap-around of repeating patterns (one iconic view that repeats four times), the Dragonflight stein has a base of simple bronze scales. It certainly doesn’t detract from the piece, but it doesn’t add any additional artistry. The handle, on the other hand, is fabulously wrought and mimics one of the epic dragons immense tails. It’s quite ergonomic, and looks great to boot. The pewter lid looks great on this stein as well.

While we can’t give away any details of which stein will bring home our “top stein” trophy, we can state that the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein is a phenomenal piece of work. Top to bottom – even with our small complaint about the base – the stein truly represents an “epic collection” piece that deserves fan attention. Even if you don’t plan to use the stein (which would be a shame), the artwork and iconography on the product make it eye candy for anyone with a fantasy flair; you don’t even have to be a WoW fan to enjoy it!

So that’s our take on the Charge of the Great Dragonflights, but we still have more steins to go! Keep checking in with the ZAM team each week, to see which World of Warcraft stein will receive our inspection and comments. In the meantime, if you can't wait to see every stein in the Taverncraft line, or you want to learn more about Charge of the Great Dragonflights or any other stein, you can find them all at WoWsteins.com or over at our sister site, Wowhead!

The Tankard O’ Terror is enormous. As I sit here, pounding away on my keyboard, the Tankard is sitting on the corner, looming over my desk like some sort of obeliskian god of the old world. In the past two reviews of the Epic Collection steins from Taverncraft, my opinions on the products seemed to get lost in the shuffle of the stats and breakdown of the steins, so this time around we’re shooting from the hip and only giving you the gory details when it’s absolutely necessary. In other words, you’re getting this reviewer’s thoughts straight from his gut, and we hope that you enjoy this set of impressions relayed a bit differently than our previous entries.

To be frank, the Tankard O’ Terror – in the eyes of some – could be conceived as a bit gaudy. Unlike the Epic Collections steins, it is a replica, which means it gets its inspiration from the actual in-game Tankard. And just like the in-game item, it’s blocky, clunky, and almost absurd to look at. The Tankard has an artificially beaten and battered look, like your dwarf warrior had one too many ales while swinging this thing around, so it’s in a way amusing to watch a person analyze the detailing on the stein. In many ways, it could almost appear to be a children’s toy… if it wasn’t so giant.

I mean, this stein is big. Really big. So big that it makes those super-sized cups you get at Burger King or McDonalds look small. This mammoth container holds nearly two liters of liquid, which is roughly the equivalent of six cans of soda or two large McDonalds’ sodas. On top of that, the stein is very heavy, weighing in at approximately four pounds. Fill it with soda, and you’ll definitely have to two-hand this bad boy if you expect to get anything into your mouth.

But almost all of the novelty of the stein is in its enormous girth. When you open the stein and show it to your friends, their first response will probably be some sort of eye gape or jaw drop. Even the biggest steins usually don’t cross into the multi-liter range, so to see something as large as the Tankard O’ Terror is… fun. This Tankard was designed to make you feel like you’re an in-game World of Warcraft avatar with the actual Tankard O’ Terror, and we think it does the job pretty well.

The best part of the Tankard O’ Terror, when all is said and done, may be its price tag. At $39.99, the Tankard is significantly cheaper than any of the Epic Collection steins, which is certainly a draw for this World of Warcraft fan. Although I love dragons and I can’t wait to get my hands on a Horde stein, the Tankard hits a good price point and gives me something from the game that I love without breaking the bank.

Unfortunately, the Tankard also can’t be displayed anywhere in your apartment or house without raising a few questioning eyebrows. The Tankard isn’t necessarily a decorative piece (though there's no reason you can't use it as a vase for flowers when not drinking from it), and thus the only reason to own a Tankard is to either be a bit closer to the lives of your characters in World of Warcraft or to drink out of. Personally, I can’t wait to give the Tankard a drinker’s chance, but each individual has to weigh those two factors when buying this beast. You can see for yourself at WoWsteins.com or over at our sister site, Wowhead, where the entire Taverncraft World of Warcraft line is on display.

So with two steins to go in our Stein-A-Week series, both the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein and the Tankard O’ Terror have caught our attention. What will we think of the Horde and Alliance steins? Check back in with us next week to find out.

The Alliance. Bastions of hope for some, hated enemies to others. They claim to be the representatives of all that is good in Azeroth, but the members of the Horde would adamantly disagree. To be honest, this writer is a proud member of the Horde, running regularly with a Undead Mage and a Troll Death Knight. So when I laid my hands upon Taverncraft’s Alliance United Epic Collection stein… I had a big hurdle to jump over. This stein represented all that I had grown to despise over the years: the “cute” Gnomes, the surly Dwarves, the arrogant Humans, the alien Dranei, and the pacifistic Night Elves.

Of course, I wasn’t going to let my prejudice of the entire faction disrupt the review process on this product. In fact, my initial reservations regarding the stein made me look at the piece more closely and without the filter of Alliance fanaticism to taint the image. 

To start, Alliance United has the same basic look and structure as all the Epic Collection steins. It can hold around 28 oz. of liquid and has equivalent dimensions to the Rise of the Lich King and Charge of the Great Dragonflights steins. The overall theme of the stein is obviously the Alliance races, but the set-up is done quite well, with the five races going from tallest to shortest to tallest. Unfortunately that means the Gnome is front and center on the piece, so if you’re not a fan of the little folk, you’ve been duly warned.

Although the Night Elf, Dranei, and Human all look very regal, both the Gnome and the Dwarf have an over-the-top, combative stance and expressions that differ greatly from the more aloof facial emotes of their Alliance kin. Some of this may be derived from the fact that two artists worked on the piece, Samwise and Glenn Rane, both of whom have their own distinct style. The piece should have focused on one style of pose or the other, and not tried to engage the audience by coupling multiple poses.

That said, the art on all of the characters is clean, crisp, and extremely detailed, which isn’t surprising considering the two artists that created the art. Both the top lip and the foundation of the stein are exceptionally designed and really accentuate the Alliance theme with the three by three lion’s head emblems. The handle also brings the theme to mind with its hammer shape and Alliance brand stamped onto the side of the head. 

With all of that in mind, this review believes that the Alliance stein is a better piece of work than the Lich King stein, but it’s just not quite as engaging as the Dragonflight product. The difference is in the color palette: the Dragonflight stein can just utilize so many different colors and still retain a sense of style. The Alliance stein, on the other hand, offers up a lot of blue, brown, and gold, but the glaringly bright red hair of the Gnome is out of place.

The good folks at Taverncraft also just recently announced a special Legendary Collection version of this stein (along with a similar Horde version), which is signed by artist Glenn Rane and limited to only 999 worldwide. It features gold accents throughout the artwork and an 18k gold-plated pewter lid.

With one more product left to review, it’s easy to forget that we’ve already covered nearly four weeks worth of steins. So if you haven’t checked them out already, make sure you take a look at the Rise of the Lich King, Tankard O’ Terror, and Charge of the Great Dragonflights steins! You can find them all at WoWsteins.com or over at our sister site, Wowhead. We look forward to seeing our last Epic Collection piece, the Horde-focused stein, so until then keep reading our World of Warcraft coverage!

It’s been a long few months, but we’ve finally made it to the end of our long stein-filled road. The drinking has been prolific, the critiques intense, and the judging incredibly difficult, but the staffers here at ZAM have scrutinized the final World of Warcraft Epic Collection stein and we’re here to lay out which stein we think stood above them all.

But first, we have to draw our attention to the final product of the lot, which happens to ironically be one of Taverncraft’s first Epic Collection steins, appropriately titled Blood of the Horde (released simultaneously with the Alliance United stein). We know you’re all familiar with the specs that each stein measures out with, but – if you happen to be a first-time reader – we’ll go ahead and give you the run down one last time. Blood of the Horde, just like its Alliance, Dragonflights, and Lich King cousins, stands over 10” tall, weighs in at three pounds, and features a lovely pewter lid.

Again, this Epic Collection stein shows off the incredible handcrafted workmanship that goes into the creation of these products. The glossy finish over the bas-relief stoneware artistry really accentuates this as not just a collectible item but also as a true piece of artwork. Steins are fantastic display pieces, and having your own “Epic Collection” could certainly turn some heads. And the Blood of the Horde certainly doesn’t diminish the groundwork we’ve already laid out with the three other Epic Collection steins. Each of the characters displayed on the stein fits well with the other, and the entire panoramic mosaic blends together as well as what we saw on the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein.

But again, there can only be one stein champion, and the Blood of the Horde just doesn’t have what it takes to take the top spot in our stein challenge. Both Sam Didier and Glenn Rane did another exceptional job with this piece – a fair bit better than what we saw on the Alliance stein – but it still cannot compare to our favorite product of the entire lot. Despite being intrinsically more “Horde-ish” than the Alliance stein, the characters portrayed still look almost gaudy in their representations. Why don’t any of them have pupils? Why does the Undead mage (priest?) look almost human? What’s the deal with the nipple covers on the Tauren?

It’s these sort of questions that drop the Blood of the Horde stein to our number three position overall. And now it’s time to find out just who made our top spot in the ZAM Stein-a-Week competition….

Are you holding your collective breath yet? Good, because riding on the top of our podium is the grandest of the Epic Collection series, the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein!

You can read more about the Dragonflights stein by clicking here, but rest assured that it was the best stein of the bunch, by – what we felt – was a large margin. With its crisp artwork, colorful characters, and simple design, we could see the Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein resting on the mantelpieces of even the strictest households.

All of the steins – including new signed & numbered Legendary Collection versions of the Horde and Alliance steins, featuring 18k gold-plated lids and gold-accented artwork and handles – are available at wowsteins.com.

Congratulations again to Taverncraft for their amazing Charge of the Great Dragonflights stein and all of their other wares. We hope to see more of these great steins as the Warhammer Online will soon be making their own appearance as part of the Taverncraft product line-up series (in fact, you can catch a sneak preview of these steins at warsteins.com)!

_{[Weekend Destructainment is a collection of funny videos brought together from all across the Internet to bring you entertainment on these slow and boring weekends.]}

The next Tiger Woods game is going to be awesome! The golf club mechanics look like they'll be vastly improved too. Great job, EA!

Weekend D continues after the break with a Mario/Dante's mash-up. Then watch as porn stars play some Dungeons & Dragons. Next, it's a Super Mario Land rock cover by Dtoider P4KO. After that is a new ad for Monster Hunter Tri.

Then a couple of guys fail "Epona's Song" on Norway's Got Talent. Next, it's Heavy Rain in real life. Followed by a quick rap on Dr. Mario by 8bitDuane. The Destructainment ends with the latest episode of Critical Flaw.

The Dante's Inferno Super Bowl commercial gets mashed-up with Mario.



Porn Stars playing Dungeons & Dragons. Spotted on The Escapist.



Super Mario Land rock cover by Dtoider P4KO.



The Monster Hunter Tri ads from Capcom are pretty weird, awesome.

A couple of guys on Norway's Got Talent tries to play "Epona's Song." They fail, miserably. Thanks, MrP!



Heavy Rain in real life.

A quick little rap on Dr. Mario by 8bitDuane. Thank, Filip!



Critical Flaw episode 7: Oh my God, a fucking cake joke? In 2010? Seriously, Adam? Goddammit. I don't care that Portal 2 was announced. I wouldn't have posted this if I didn't love you so much. Everyone's going to hate it. You asshole.

The Burntwire Brothers remodeled a room to house their collection of D&D; paraphernalia as well as a place to hold game sessions. There are stained glass windows, faux dungeon walls, a metal portcullis, dragon statuettes and a rack of swords. As if the place needs more atmosphere, the Dungeon Master can control the room's lighting, a fog machine and a strobe from his or her seat at the table.

More:

• Everything I need to know I learned from D&D;
• D&D; Origami
• Writers reminisce about Dungeons & Dragons

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Home Entertainment | Digg this!

Allright, D20 system can be used in Dungeons & Dragons, I don't mind that, but one thing what really, really aggravates me is that every single game must be converted to D20. I'd like to get BESM for my collection, but quess what, easily available ...

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Anybody there can help me to find backcovers of UK blu-ray on this films listed below? I will be so happy if you can help :-) THANKS p.s its not for pirat stuff ;-) I am only working on a danish blu-ray site where we have UK blu-ray listed :) *10 Things I Hate About You 2012 48 Hours 9 9: Limited Edition A Bunch Of Amateurs A Mighty Heart A Perfect Getaway A Serious Man About Last Night Adams: Doctor Atomic Adventureland Alien Vs Predator / Aliens Vs Predator - Requiem Aliens In The Attic All Quiet On The Western Front All The Right Noises Alvin and the Chipmunks - Munk Rock Edition Amelia Amor, Vida de Mi Vida Amusement An Education Antichrist Anvil! The Story Of Anvil Apollo 13 Army of Crime Attack on Leningrad Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery Balanchine: Jewels Baroque Motion Battlestar Galactica: Season 1 Battlestar Galactica: Season 2 Battlestar Galactica: Season 3 Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.0 BBC Natural History Collection, The Beaufort Bhool Bhulaiyaa Bicycle Thieves, The Bill Douglas Trilogy Billu Barber Billy Idol: In Super Overdrive Live Blackalicious - 4/20 Live In Seattle Blue Move - Dolphins Bon Jovi - Live At Madison Square Garden Borat Boyzone - Back Again - No Matter What - Live 2008 Brahms: Piano Concerto No.2 Breathless Brideshead Revisited Broken Embraces Brotherhood Of The Wolf Bubba Ho-Tep Bullet Boy Bunny and the Bull Candy Captivity Caravaggio Cars Combi Pack Cass Cavalli: Ercole Amante Cecilia & Bryn At Glyndebourne Cell 2, The Chaos Che: Part One Chopin: La Dame Aux Camelias Circus Live, The Cirque Du Freak - The Vampire's Assistant City Girl City Rats Clash Of The Titans Clive Barker's Book Of Blood Clubbed Contract, The Copying Beethoven Cosy Fire Blue Waters Couples Retreat Coyote Ugly Cracks Creation Crusades Crescent and the Cross, The Cry Wolf Dante's Inferno Day of the Triffids Day Watch Dead Man Running Dead Man's Shoes Debussy: Pelleas Et Melisande Deep, The Delibes: Sylvia Demons Season One Descent, The Devil May Cry Devil's Rejects, The Diagnosis Death Doctor Who - The Complete Specials Dorian Gray Double Life of Veronique, The Dove: Adventures Of Pinocchio Dumbo Dungeons And Dragons - Wrath Of The Dragon God Dying Breed Earthscapes: Fall in New England Earthscapes: Hawaii Earthscapes: Rocky Mountains Earthscapes: The World's Most Beautful Places El Sistema - Music to Change Life Elektra Elizabeth Elizabeth: The Golden Age Eminem - Live From New York City Escape From L.A. Evan Almighty Evangelion 1.01 - You're Not Alone Express, The Fall Out Boy: Live in Phoenix Fantastic Mr Fox Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Feast 2 - Sloppy Seconds Ferruccio Busoni: Doktor Faust Finding Nemo Fireball Fireball XL5 - A Day In The Life Of A Space General Fireplace Firm, The Flags Of Our Fathers / Letters Of Iwo Jima Flood Four Brothers Four Seasons - Peak Escape Fracture FREEDOM Blu-ray Disc Box Funny People Galaxy Quest Gamer Ganges Garfield's Pet Force 3D Gavin And Stacey - 2008 Christmas Special Gavin And Stacey - Series 1-3 And 2008 Christmas Special Gavin And Stacey - Series 3 George Frideric Handel - Admeto, re di Tessaglia Ghost Rider / Resident Evil 3: Extinction / Hellboy Ghosts Of Mars Glenn Gould: Hereafter Gluck - Orpheus & Eurydice - Pina Bausch Goal 3 - Taking On The World Green Berets,The Grudge 3, The Halloween 2 Halo - Legends Harry Brown Haunted Mansion, The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto, The HD Window - The Great Southwest Hell Ride Heyy Babyy Hidalgo Home Of The Brave Horseman, The Hostel / Hostel 2 / Shrooms How The Earth Made Us Hustle & Flow I'm Not There Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The In The Electric Mist Informers, The Interceptor Is Anybody There? It Might Get Loud Jack Said Jennifer's Body Jimi Hendrix - Live At Woodstock Jimi Hendrix Experience, The - Live At Monterey Johann Sebastian Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1-6 John Legend - Live At The House Of Blues John Q. Jose Feliciano - The Paris Concert Joseph Haydn - The Virtual Haydn Kaiser Chiefs - Live From Elland Road Kamikaze Girls Kanye West - Late Orchestration Karas Collection Katyn Keane - Live Ken Hensley: Blood on the Highway Korn - Live At Montreux 2004 Lage Raho Munna Bhai Larry Carlton, Robben Ford And Autour Du Blues - Paris Concert Last Battle, The Last Year in Marienbad Law Abiding Citizen Le Mépris Learn to count Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 Leopard, The License To Wed Life After People: Season 1 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Looking For Eric Lord Of The Rings - Fellowship Of The Ring Lord Of The Rings - The Return Of The King Lord Of The Rings - The Two Towers Lord Of The Rings Trilogy Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum, The Love Happens M Magnolia - Directors Cut Man Of Violence Manchester United - Champions League Final Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana, Leoncavallo: Pagliacci Massenet: Thais Men of Honour Men Who Stare at Goats Mesrine - Parts 1 & 2 Messenger: The Story Of Joan Of Arc Metallica: Francais Pour Une Nuit Michael Jackson - The Earth's Song Mike Stern Band - Paris Concert Mission Impossible 2 Monster House / Open Season / Surf's Up Mozart: La Finta Giardiniera Music and Lyrics Mystic River National Geographic - Amazing Planet Neil Young: Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972 Neverending Story, The Night At The Museum / Night At The Museum 2 - Battle of the Smithsonian Ninja NINO ROTA: Complete Music For Viola /Violin and Piano - Acoustic Reality Experience Number 23, The Ocean Origins - Four Billion Years In The Ocean (IMAX) Open Season / Open Season 2 Other Side Of Underneath, The Pandorum Paranormal Activity Partner Passchendaele Permissive Petra Salutes - Pavarotti Memorial Concert Pierrepoint Planet 51 Planet Earth/Life Poison Ivy 4 - The Secret Society Pontypool Privilege Punch-Drunk Love Punisher, The / Punisher - War Zone Puppies And Kittens Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos Nos. 2&3 - Acoustic Reality Experience Rambo/Tears of the Sun/Black Hawk Down Red Balloon,The Red Dragon Red Road Resurrection World Tour Live At Rock In Rio III Richard Strauss: Elektra Romeo et Juliette Rookie, The Rossini: Il Turco In Italia Rossini: La Gazzetta Rush Hour Rush Hour 2 *

There's a sad tradition of looking back at the end of the year to see the toll that time has taken of our friends and heroes.  We may never had met some of those we most admired, may never have stood in the same place with them.  But we shared time with them.  Shared an era.  Some of them not only shared our time, but helped to shape it, and 2009 is the last year we hold in common.

So here, as last year, is an eclectic gathering of just a few of those we lost during the last twelve months.  I invite you to add other names and stories to the list.

When you think of baseball, Billy Werber may not be the first name that comes to your mind. For three seasons in the 1930s, he lead the league in stolen bases, but with a .271 career batting average and only 78 home runs spaced across 11 seasons, he wasn't exactly an offensive powerhouse.  But if Werber wasn't that famous, he shared both time and space with someone who was. Werber was the last living teammate of Babe Ruth.  He was also Ruth's last living opponent.

Who was so cool that he not only turned down the chance to be The Saint, but passed on the chance to say "Bond, James Bond"? It was Secret Agent man, Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan was born in Queens, New York City, but he cemented his position as an international icon when, during the 4th season of Secret Agent (Danger Man in the UK) McGoohan created a new series which he produced, wrote, directed and starred in. More than forty years later, fans are still puzzling out all the messages of The Prisoner (and trying to avoid the remake).

You may still have leftover holiday ham today, but sooner or later you'll grab another hot dog, and when you do, thank Alan Geisler for the red onion sauce he invented.

Rabbit came to rest in 1990, but it took nearly two decades more before Rabbit's creator put down his pen. Multiple Pulitzer winner, John Updike, wrote about characters in crisis -- ordinary Americans caught in hard spots. He did it with prose that celebrated directness and plots that were as whimsical as Estwick, as ordinary as those surrounding Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, and as familiar as our own lives.

Andrew Wyeth

Mr. Rogers kept an Andrew Wyeth painting next to the door of his home, visible in every episode of his show. What higher endorsement can there be?

In these days of CSI and Bones, it's easy to forget where the character of the forensic scientist appeared on American TV. But there would have been far fewer chances to say "Book'em, Danno" if Che Fong, played by actor Harry Endo had not been there with all the answers.

Figure eight is double four. Figure four is half of eight. If you skate, you would be great. If you could make a figure eight. And if you sing, you would be great if you could achieve the crystal purity of singer Blossom Dearie. Dearie was a well-known jazz artist since the 1940s, but for a generation of Americans, she'll be remembered as the voice of "Mother Necessity" and well as the spokeswoman for "Figure Eight."

9/11 widow and victim's advocate Beverly Eckert died in a plane crash only days after meeting with President Obama. And if you're wondering, that's not ironic.

And then there were five, after munchkin Clarence Swensen was gone.

It wasn't just Hollywood script writers who ended up on the black list during the McCarthy era. William Price was one of 35 journalists called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1955. He refused to invoke the fifth amendment to protect himself. Instead he declared that he was protected by the first amendment. He was fired the next day.

You may be wondering why the "economic indicators" and the conditions you see around you rarely seem in alignment. But you won't be able to ask Raymond Saulnier who devised the indicators while at the National Bureau of Economic Research during the Eisenhower administration.

Robley Rex was my distant relative (you'll have to excuse me for not being able to follow the combination of X-removed and Nth-degree of cousinhood).  On his death, Frank Buckles became the last surviving World War I veteran from the United States.

If your Chatty Cathy is ailing, you may need to count on home remedies. Irving Chais, owner of the New York Doll Hospital, is no longer available.

His stories ranged from the painfully realistic recollections of his childhood internment in a Japanese prison camp, to jungles made of glass and future worlds were songs compose themselves. Whatever the venue J. G. Ballard fixed his subjects with searing insight and unflinching clarity.

If you wandered away from the Big Two during the 2004 election season, you might have been enticed to vote for the Personal Choice Party, especially if you had fond teenage memories of the vice-presidential candidate and, um, multi-talented former "Ivory soap girl" Marilyn Chambers.

Everyone remembers Gygax, but if you've ever rolled a 20-sided die, you owe equal thanks to Dave Arneson who was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and the originator of many of the basics behind every RPG that followed.

In 1993, George Tiller was shot in both arms. He did not let this stop him from returning to work and helping women caught in the most difficult of circumstances. He continued in his work despite daily harassment. He continued in his work despite being labeled a "baby killer" no less than 28 times by Bill O'Reilly. He continued despite lies told about him by O'Reilly and others. He continued until an anti-abortion activist entered the church where he was attending worship, and shot George Tiller through the eye at close range.

It's easy to think of a nun as someone who has stepped away from society, but Carol Anne O'Marie not only ran a shelter for homeless women, she was the author of 10 mystery novels -- novels that featured an elderly nun who solves crimes.

If you visit the site of one of America's great shames, the Manzanar Internment Camp, you can see the desk and typewriter of Togo Tanaka on display. It was at this desk that Tanaka reported on the often ugly conditions inside the camp from the perspective of the people being held there. His work to document what went on at Manzanar made him a target for both the government and his fellow internees.

When Robert Furchgott worked out the factors in endothelial cells that causes blood vessels to relax, he received a Nobel Prize. He didn't receive any payment from the most famous product of his work -- Viagra.

Not only did Wayne Allwine provide the voice of Mickey Mouse for more than 30 years, he was married to the woman who provides the voice for Minnie Mouse.

At 6'7" former football player Rodger McFarlane didn't fit the stereotype of a gay man. Starting as a volunteer, he became the first director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis and helped organize many programs in the fight against AIDS.

At a time when America appears to show disdain for international law, it's worth remembering "the George Washington of modern international law" Henry King. A U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, King continued to work on a legal approach to war crimes for decades. It was at his insistence that the International Criminal Court added starting a war as a war crime.

If you were an African-American reader of romance novels before 1980, the number of books available where the couples were African-American was more than limited, it was nonexistent. Elsie Washington changed that with her novel Entwined Destines.

Martha Mason was only 11 years old when polio forced her into an iron lung. She would remain in the device for the next 60 years. Despite this, she graduated first in her class at Wake Forest, worked as a reporter for her local newspaper, and in 2003 wrote a book about her life.

Whether it was giving voice to numerous characters in animated films, or providing animated comic relief for partners ranging from Burt Reynolds to Dean Martin, Dom Deluise was sure to bring a smile.

The supply-side economics that Jack Kemp championed helped set up decades in which the wages of average Americans stagnated and those at the top benefited. But Kemp's example in looking at the issues of racism and immigration provide lessons that many Republicans, and some Democrats, should take to heart.

"The Straight Shooter" Joe Bowman performed his amazing feats of marksmanship for rodeo fans, gun show goers, police SWAT teams, FBI agents, NASA astronauts, film stars, and foreign dignitaries.

You're going to have to come up with a better pitch, because Billy Mays is unavailable to move your product.

By last spring, the face (among other things) that launched a million wall posters was indelibly marked by the long, hard and public struggle with cancer, but Farah Fawcett continued the fight to the end. When Farrah and her fellow Angels appeared on television in 1976, it was easy to dismiss the characters as high-kicking models who often found themselves in scenarios that involved limited clothing. But they were also tough, clever, and constantly outsmarting the men who underestimated them. Farrah went on to show that she had real acting chops to go with the no-so-real karate chops.

If there was any departure in 2009 that both shocked and generated discussion, it was that of the "King of Pop" Michael Jackson. Jackson was... immensely talented.

America's best-known sidekick had some tough times in his final years, but for many of us Ed McMahon will always be the jovial presence at the edge of the scene, helping to make both host and guests comfortable with a few well-timed words and a booming laugh.

100% of respondents note that Alec Gallup, chairman of the Gallup Poll and son of the founder, handed off his duties this year.

When cruise ships ferry "explorers" to Antarctica with regularity, it's easy to forget that once Edith Ronne was the only American woman who had ever been there.

There was a period of little to no sunspot activity lasting from around 1645 to 1715. The relationship between low solar activity and the climate is still open to question, but it's a sure thing that Jack Eddy put the data together and named the Maunder Minimum.

If that Farah poster generated nostalgia, then David Carradine, despite roles in over 100 films, is probably forever wandering the west as Kwai Chang Caine. If not, just let Black Mamba know that no one needs to kill Bill.

David Eddings had a theory about how to create a fantasy novels, an approach that some thought made his work formulaic. To investigate you might want to read just a couple of his novels. Or maybe a couple more.  And a couple more after that, and...

The way the civil rights movement would bring the GOP to power in the South might have been surprising to some politicians, but not to G. Alexander Heard an adviser to both JFK and LBJ, who predicted the change in 1952.

Sure, winning that hundred-yard dash at the Olympics may be tough, but it's equally tough to set world records the way Waldo McBurney did it -- by outliving all competition in his age group. The multiple world record holder in the 100+ category was 106 when he died this year.

Here's a confession: as a teenager, I wasn't watching those Marilyn Chambers films, I was reading books by John Keel. Whether it was the inter dimensional beings of Strange Creatures From Time and Space or the unmatched weirdness of The Mothman Prophecies no one sold a UFO conspiracy like Keel.

If you see a wiener-mobile roll past draped in black, it's because Oscar Mayer, jr. has gone.

No matter how momentous the events, their effect is limited without someone to tell the story. William Emerson was a southerner who understood the southern mindset, and was able to out-talk, out-joke, and out-bluster everyone in range while reporting the often painful and occasionally joyous truth of what was happening in America.

An important chapter in our history has come to an end. Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time.

If you love the gentle piano work in the background of Brige over Troubled Water that's the work of Larry Knechtel, who also performed on tracks for Elvis, the Beach Boys, and Bread.

Both science fiction readers and science fiction writers have long been grateful to Donald Grant, who took a chance on books that didn't always seem commercial and produced volumes of exceptional quality.

Sometimes August is the cruelest month. Not only Ted but Eunice Kennedy Shriver left us in August. Founder of what would become the Special Olympics and one of the founders of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, she was every bit a Kennedy.

Need an expert on the dulcimer? What about the autoharp, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and guitar? Mike Seeger played them all, and did so beautifully -- but never so well as when he joined his family in the New Lost City Ramblers.

The popular princess, the jock, the rebel from a troubled background, the nerd, and the girl sunk into despair. Why are they all hanging around the school together? Because John Hughes wrote them that way on his way to defining the teenage years of a generation.

Budd Schulberg might not have written about teen angst, but with a few little films like On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd to his credit, I suppose he can be forgiven.

For proof that you can think that someone is wrong on almost every point, and still find them witty and entertaining, you don't have to look any further than William Safire. Or should that be "farther"? Without Bill, we may never be sure. Why don't more conservatives harness the kind of arguments that Safire used to promote his positions? Because none of them has half the intelligence or one tenth the oratorical firepower.

For decades, the source of the best Hollywood inside info wasn't a web site or even the tabloids. It was Armand "Army" Archerd.

Don't remember Milton Supman? How about comedian, host, and perennial game-show guest Soupy Sales?  

If the theme songs for the Addam's Family and Green Acres are still stuck in your head after four decades, you can thank composer Vic Mizzy for these and many more.

This was a bad year for Navajo Code Talkers with at least five of their few remaining members being lost over the course of the summer.

Lester Shubin served in the Army during World War II, which might have been his inspiration in creating the Kevlar vest.

Her list of friends reads like a who's-who of civil rights, so it's no surprise that 107-year old Ann Nixon Cooper was featured in President Obama's speech on election night 2008.

I liked Brittany Murphy darn it. The girl did sassy really well.

If there's a middle school student (or science teacher) in your home then you're probably familiar with (and fond of) the characters from Beakman's World. There's no actor in a rat suit I'll miss more than Mark Ritts who played "Lester" on the show -- probably not what a guy with an lit degree from Harvard expected to do with his life.

If you passed Andy Hallet in the street, you might not recognize him. In his best-known role, Hallet played the green singing-dancing demon "Lorne" on Angel.

The Clamshell Alliance is one of those names that rings few bells today, but when Guy Chichester help found the group in opposition to the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, it helped to kick off a new generation of environmental activism.

As always, this is a hugely incomplete list filled more with names that caught my eye than with those who were most important to the world -- or to you. I encourage you to add more.

Jason Long of Auburn, a schoolteacher and blogger, each day writes a short story of 11 to 88 words. "I fear the elevens," he says. He has 347 stories done, 18 to go.

For a writer, Jason Sinclair Long is obsessed with numbers. Before he types a word, he rolls a pair of dice – one green, one gray – both eight-sided relics from pre-teen Dungeons and Dragons bouts.

Shake. Toss. Sigh. Write.

He tells the story of a murder in 31 words. A marriage in 87. A sci-fi ditty in 12. Or a travel adventure in 63. The lower the number, usually, the longer he spends in front of his laptop.

"I fear the elevens," said Long, 37, of Auburn. "Sometimes a very, very short story takes an hour or two, in some cases more, because I labor over word choice and sentence structure."

Long started his project, Flash Fiction 365, on Jan. 1 this year. He was inspired by the six-word story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," and a schedule increasingly packed with teaching and raising his toddler son.

Long set out to write and post one very short story on his blog every day until Dec. 31. It could be any genre, between 11 and 88 words long. Titles don't count toward the word total.

The results sometimes read like experimental poetry. Underneath each tale, Long has held himself to the rules of short-story composition: Each must contain an exposition, characters, plot and setting. There must be some kind of conflict that arcs into a climax, then resolves in denouement.

"I'm not always able to do it," Long said. "That's the thing about doing it every day. You miss, miss, miss, miss, and then you hit. Then you miss again."

On Feb. 23, Long rolled an 88 and wrote a hit, called "Balancing Racks":

Victor couldn't remember the last time Stella wanted to play Scrabble period, let alone all night.

Next morning, dead even, they ignored their glassy-eyed stares and went one more.

Stella triple-worded her way to victory.

"Feeling superior?" V asked.

She hummed lightly, smiling in reply.

He boxed the game, shelved it, brewed Darjeeling.

She opened a window, let in the air.

"I cheated," Stella said, at last.

"I know."

"Not at Scrabble."

"I know."

They held their tea close, warming their hands against the worst of it.

Long had plenty of experience with long-form writing before he picked up his dice. He has a master's degree in playwriting from UCLA. Ten of his plays have been produced at small theaters in New York and Los Angeles, he said, and he's written most of a novel.

But since he's been working as a drama teacher at Placerville High School – going on nine years now, with a four-year break as a performer in Blue Man Group – and since he and his wife have been raising their son, now 2 1/2 years old, Long became frustrated with the blinking cursor on his screen.

"It was increasingly difficult to get any writing done, let alone feel like I was getting anywhere," he said. "I wanted to feel like I was achieving something."

Now he seizes a couple hours a day during his son's nap, or between classes at school. Whether on vacation or floored with a stomach flu, he maintained the daily ritual. When his faith in the whole thing waned, he turned it into a 12-word story, "Sisyphus and His Pal, Bruce."

"This is getting ridiculous."

"Yep."

"Will it ever cease?"

"Nope."

He acquiesced.

Long is undecided about what to do with the blog when the 365 days are up. After the New Year, he may choose his favorite 12 short, short stories, then develop each one into a regular short story every month. But his friends are urging him to try to get the 2009 collection published as a book.

While Long says the exercise ended up taking as long as it would have to write parts of a novel every day, saving no time in the long run – "none, none at all" – he did learn to savor the time he spent not writing.

"When I was doing my master's, anytime I wasn't writing, I was thinking about writing," he said. "With this project, almost the reverse has come true. I do the project, devote silent time to it, but when it's done, it's done."

And he can go on a hike with his wife or play with his son.

"Turning a 14-word sentence into an eight-word sentence has made me appreciate the minutiae in other parts of life," he said. "Just putting that orange Lego on top of the brown and seeing my son's face light up.

"It's given me a bigger appreciation for the smaller things."

Jason Sinclair Long's blog.

Jason Long of Auburn, a schoolteacher and blogger, each day writes a short story of 11 to 88 words. "I fear the elevens," he says. He has 347 stories done, 18 to go.

For a writer, Jason Sinclair Long is obsessed with numbers. Before he types a word, he rolls a pair of dice – one green, one gray – both eight-sided relics from pre-teen Dungeons and Dragons bouts.

Shake. Toss. Sigh. Write.

He tells the story of a murder in 31 words. A marriage in 87. A sci-fi ditty in 12. Or a travel adventure in 63. The lower the number, usually, the longer he spends in front of his laptop.

"I fear the elevens," said Long, 37, of Auburn. "Sometimes a very, very short story takes an hour or two, in some cases more, because I labor over word choice and sentence structure."

Long started his project, Flash Fiction 365, on Jan. 1 this year. He was inspired by the six-word story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," and a schedule increasingly packed with teaching and raising his toddler son.

Long set out to write and post one very short story on his blog every day until Dec. 31. It could be any genre, between 11 and 88 words long. Titles don't count toward the word total.

The results sometimes read like experimental poetry. Underneath each tale, Long has held himself to the rules of short-story composition: Each must contain an exposition, characters, plot and setting. There must be some kind of conflict that arcs into a climax, then resolves in denouement.

"I'm not always able to do it," Long said. "That's the thing about doing it every day. You miss, miss, miss, miss, and then you hit. Then you miss again."

On Feb. 23, Long rolled an 88 and wrote a hit, called "Balancing Racks":

Victor couldn't remember the last time Stella wanted to play Scrabble period, let alone all night.

Next morning, dead even, they ignored their glassy-eyed stares and went one more.

Stella triple-worded her way to victory.

"Feeling superior?" V asked.

She hummed lightly, smiling in reply.

He boxed the game, shelved it, brewed Darjeeling.

She opened a window, let in the air.

"I cheated," Stella said, at last.

"I know."

"Not at Scrabble."

"I know."

They held their tea close, warming their hands against the worst of it.

Long had plenty of experience with long-form writing before he picked up his dice. He has a master's degree in playwriting from UCLA. Ten of his plays have been produced at small theaters in New York and Los Angeles, he said, and he's written most of a novel.

But since he's been working as a drama teacher at Placerville High School – going on nine years now, with a four-year break as a performer in Blue Man Group – and since he and his wife have been raising their son, now 2 1/2 years old, Long became frustrated with the blinking cursor on his screen.

"It was increasingly difficult to get any writing done, let alone feel like I was getting anywhere," he said. "I wanted to feel like I was achieving something."

Now he seizes a couple hours a day during his son's nap, or between classes at school. Whether on vacation or floored with a stomach flu, he maintained the daily ritual. When his faith in the whole thing waned, he turned it into a 12-word story, "Sisyphus and His Pal, Bruce."

"This is getting ridiculous."

"Yep."

"Will it ever cease?"

"Nope."

He acquiesced.

Long is undecided about what to do with the blog when the 365 days are up. After the New Year, he may choose his favorite 12 short, short stories, then develop each one into a regular short story every month. But his friends are urging him to try to get the 2009 collection published as a book.

While Long says the exercise ended up taking as long as it would have to write parts of a novel every day, saving no time in the long run – "none, none at all" – he did learn to savor the time he spent not writing.

"When I was doing my master's, anytime I wasn't writing, I was thinking about writing," he said. "With this project, almost the reverse has come true. I do the project, devote silent time to it, but when it's done, it's done."

And he can go on a hike with his wife or play with his son.

"Turning a 14-word sentence into an eight-word sentence has made me appreciate the minutiae in other parts of life," he said. "Just putting that orange Lego on top of the brown and seeing my son's face light up.

"It's given me a bigger appreciation for the smaller things."

Jason Sinclair Long's blog is at http://flashfiction365. blogspot.com/

Jason Long of Auburn, a schoolteacher and blogger, each day writes a short story of 11 to 88 words. "I fear the elevens," he says. He has 347 stories done, 18 to go.

For a writer, Jason Sinclair Long is obsessed with numbers. Before he types a word, he rolls a pair of dice – one green, one gray – both eight-sided relics from pre-teen Dungeons and Dragons bouts.

Shake. Toss. Sigh. Write.

He tells the story of a murder in 31 words. A marriage in 87. A sci-fi ditty in 12. Or a travel adventure in 63. The lower the number, usually, the longer he spends in front of his laptop.

"I fear the elevens," said Long, 37, of Auburn. "Sometimes a very, very short story takes an hour or two, in some cases more, because I labor over word choice and sentence structure."

Long started his project, Flash Fiction 365, on Jan. 1 this year. He was inspired by the six-word story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," and a schedule increasingly packed with teaching and raising his toddler son.

Long set out to write and post one very short story on his blog every day until Dec. 31. It could be any genre, between 11 and 88 words long. Titles don't count toward the word total.

The results sometimes read like experimental poetry. Underneath each tale, Long has held himself to the rules of short-story composition: Each must contain an exposition, characters, plot and setting. There must be some kind of conflict that arcs into a climax, then resolves in denouement.

"I'm not always able to do it," Long said. "That's the thing about doing it every day. You miss, miss, miss, miss, and then you hit. Then you miss again."

On Feb. 23, Long rolled an 88 and wrote a hit, called "Balancing Racks":

Victor couldn't remember the last time Stella wanted to play Scrabble period, let alone all night.

Next morning, dead even, they ignored their glassy-eyed stares and went one more.

Stella triple-worded her way to victory.

"Feeling superior?" V asked.

She hummed lightly, smiling in reply.

He boxed the game, shelved it, brewed Darjeeling.

She opened a window, let in the air.

"I cheated," Stella said, at last.

"I know."

"Not at Scrabble."

"I know."

They held their tea close, warming their hands against the worst of it.

Long had plenty of experience with long-form writing before he picked up his dice. He has a master's degree in playwriting from UCLA. Ten of his plays have been produced at small theaters in New York and Los Angeles, he said, and he's written most of a novel.

But since he's been working as a drama teacher at Placerville High School – going on nine years now, with a four-year break as a performer in Blue Man Group – and since he and his wife have been raising their son, now 2 1/2 years old, Long became frustrated with the blinking cursor on his screen.

"It was increasingly difficult to get any writing done, let alone feel like I was getting anywhere," he said. "I wanted to feel like I was achieving something."

Now he seizes a couple hours a day during his son's nap, or between classes at school. Whether on vacation or floored with a stomach flu, he maintained the daily ritual. When his faith in the whole thing waned, he turned it into a 12-word story, "Sisyphus and His Pal, Bruce."

"This is getting ridiculous."

"Yep."

"Will it ever cease?"

"Nope."

He acquiesced.

Long is undecided about what to do with the blog when the 365 days are up. After the New Year, he may choose his favorite 12 short, short stories, then develop each one into a regular short story every month. But his friends are urging him to try to get the 2009 collection published as a book.

While Long says the exercise ended up taking as long as it would have to write parts of a novel every day, saving no time in the long run – "none, none at all" – he did learn to savor the time he spent not writing.

"When I was doing my master's, anytime I wasn't writing, I was thinking about writing," he said. "With this project, almost the reverse has come true. I do the project, devote silent time to it, but when it's done, it's done."

And he can go on a hike with his wife or play with his son.

"Turning a 14-word sentence into an eight-word sentence has made me appreciate the minutiae in other parts of life," he said. "Just putting that orange Lego on top of the brown and seeing my son's face light up.

"It's given me a bigger appreciation for the smaller things."

Jason Sinclair Long's blog is at http://flashfiction365. blogspot.com/

Jason Long of Auburn, a schoolteacher and blogger, each day writes a short story of 11 to 88 words. "I fear the elevens," he says. He has 347 stories done, 18 to go.

For a writer, Jason Sinclair Long is obsessed with numbers. Before he types a word, he rolls a pair of dice – one green, one gray – both eight-sided relics from pre-teen Dungeons and Dragons bouts.

Shake. Toss. Sigh. Write.

He tells the story of a murder in 31 words. A marriage in 87. A sci-fi ditty in 12. Or a travel adventure in 63. The lower the number, usually, the longer he spends in front of his laptop.

"I fear the elevens," said Long, 37, of Auburn. "Sometimes a very, very short story takes an hour or two, in some cases more, because I labor over word choice and sentence structure."

Long started his project, Flash Fiction 365, on Jan. 1 this year. He was inspired by the six-word story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," and a schedule increasingly packed with teaching and raising his toddler son.

Long set out to write and post one very short story on his blog every day until Dec. 31. It could be any genre, between 11 and 88 words long. Titles don't count toward the word total.

The results sometimes read like experimental poetry. Underneath each tale, Long has held himself to the rules of short-story composition: Each must contain an exposition, characters, plot and setting. There must be some kind of conflict that arcs into a climax, then resolves in denouement.

"I'm not always able to do it," Long said. "That's the thing about doing it every day. You miss, miss, miss, miss, and then you hit. Then you miss again."

On Feb. 23, Long rolled an 88 and wrote a hit, called "Balancing Racks":

Victor couldn't remember the last time Stella wanted to play Scrabble period, let alone all night.

Next morning, dead even, they ignored their glassy-eyed stares and went one more.

Stella triple-worded her way to victory.

"Feeling superior?" V asked.

She hummed lightly, smiling in reply.

He boxed the game, shelved it, brewed Darjeeling.

She opened a window, let in the air.

"I cheated," Stella said, at last.

"I know."

"Not at Scrabble."

"I know."

They held their tea close, warming their hands against the worst of it.

Long had plenty of experience with long-form writing before he picked up his dice. He has a master's degree in playwriting from UCLA. Ten of his plays have been produced at small theaters in New York and Los Angeles, he said, and he's written most of a novel.

But since he's been working as a drama teacher at Placerville High School – going on nine years now, with a four-year break as a performer in Blue Man Group – and since he and his wife have been raising their son, now 2 1/2 years old, Long became frustrated with the blinking cursor on his screen.

"It was increasingly difficult to get any writing done, let alone feel like I was getting anywhere," he said. "I wanted to feel like I was achieving something."

Now he seizes a couple hours a day during his son's nap, or between classes at school. Whether on vacation or floored with a stomach flu, he maintained the daily ritual. When his faith in the whole thing waned, he turned it into a 12-word story, "Sisyphus and His Pal, Bruce."

"This is getting ridiculous."

"Yep."

"Will it ever cease?"

"Nope."

He acquiesced.

Long is undecided about what to do with the blog when the 365 days are up. After the New Year, he may choose his favorite 12 short, short stories, then develop each one into a regular short story every month. But his friends are urging him to try to get the 2009 collection published as a book.

While Long says the exercise ended up taking as long as it would have to write parts of a novel every day, saving no time in the long run – "none, none at all" – he did learn to savor the time he spent not writing.

"When I was doing my master's, anytime I wasn't writing, I was thinking about writing," he said. "With this project, almost the reverse has come true. I do the project, devote silent time to it, but when it's done, it's done."

And he can go on a hike with his wife or play with his son.

"Turning a 14-word sentence into an eight-word sentence has made me appreciate the minutiae in other parts of life," he said. "Just putting that orange Lego on top of the brown and seeing my son's face light up.

"It's given me a bigger appreciation for the smaller things."

Jason Sinclair Long's blog is at http://flashfiction365. blogspot.com/

Jason Long of Auburn, a schoolteacher and blogger, each day writes a short story of 11 to 88 words. "I fear the elevens," he says. He has 347 stories done, 18 to go.

For a writer, Jason Sinclair Long is obsessed with numbers. Before he types a word, he rolls a pair of dice – one green, one gray – both eight-sided relics from pre-teen Dungeons and Dragons bouts.

Shake. Toss. Sigh. Write.

He tells the story of a murder in 31 words. A marriage in 87. A sci-fi ditty in 12. Or a travel adventure in 63. The lower the number, usually, the longer he spends in front of his laptop.

"I fear the elevens," said Long, 37, of Auburn. "Sometimes a very, very short story takes an hour or two, in some cases more, because I labor over word choice and sentence structure."

Long started his project, Flash Fiction 365, on Jan. 1 this year. He was inspired by the six-word story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," and a schedule increasingly packed with teaching and raising his toddler son.

Long set out to write and post one very short story on his blog every day until Dec. 31. It could be any genre, between 11 and 88 words long. Titles don't count toward the word total.

The results sometimes read like experimental poetry. Underneath each tale, Long has held himself to the rules of short-story composition: Each must contain an exposition, characters, plot and setting. There must be some kind of conflict that arcs into a climax, then resolves in denouement.

"I'm not always able to do it," Long said. "That's the thing about doing it every day. You miss, miss, miss, miss, and then you hit. Then you miss again."

On Feb. 23, Long rolled an 88 and wrote a hit, called "Balancing Racks":

Victor couldn't remember the last time Stella wanted to play Scrabble period, let alone all night.

Next morning, dead even, they ignored their glassy-eyed stares and went one more.

Stella triple-worded her way to victory.

"Feeling superior?" V asked.

She hummed lightly, smiling in reply.

He boxed the game, shelved it, brewed Darjeeling.

She opened a window, let in the air.

"I cheated," Stella said, at last.

"I know."

"Not at Scrabble."

"I know."

They held their tea close, warming their hands against the worst of it.

Long had plenty of experience with long-form writing before he picked up his dice. He has a master's degree in playwriting from UCLA. Ten of his plays have been produced at small theaters in New York and Los Angeles, he said, and he's written most of a novel.

But since he's been working as a drama teacher at Placerville High School – going on nine years now, with a four-year break as a performer in Blue Man Group – and since he and his wife have been raising their son, now 2 1/2 years old, Long became frustrated with the blinking cursor on his screen.

"It was increasingly difficult to get any writing done, let alone feel like I was getting anywhere," he said. "I wanted to feel like I was achieving something."

Now he seizes a couple hours a day during his son's nap, or between classes at school. Whether on vacation or floored with a stomach flu, he maintained the daily ritual. When his faith in the whole thing waned, he turned it into a 12-word story, "Sisyphus and His Pal, Bruce."

"This is getting ridiculous."

"Yep."

"Will it ever cease?"

"Nope."

He acquiesced.

Long is undecided about what to do with the blog when the 365 days are up. After the New Year, he may choose his favorite 12 short, short stories, then develop each one into a regular short story every month. But his friends are urging him to try to get the 2009 collection published as a book.

While Long says the exercise ended up taking as long as it would have to write parts of a novel every day, saving no time in the long run – "none, none at all" – he did learn to savor the time he spent not writing.

"When I was doing my master's, anytime I wasn't writing, I was thinking about writing," he said. "With this project, almost the reverse has come true. I do the project, devote silent time to it, but when it's done, it's done."

And he can go on a hike with his wife or play with his son.

"Turning a 14-word sentence into an eight-word sentence has made me appreciate the minutiae in other parts of life," he said. "Just putting that orange Lego on top of the brown and seeing my son's face light up.

"It's given me a bigger appreciation for the smaller things."

Jason Sinclair Long's blog is at http://flashfiction365. blogspot.com/

In its November/December 2009 issue, Bookmarks Magazinelooks back at the magazine's favorite books of 2009. This year Kindle readers will be pleased to learn that 53 of the 58 titles are available in Kindle editions.

Here's a rundown of all 58 (the 5 NOT available for the Kindle are listed last). Given the length of the list, I've divided the post into three consecutive parts.

LITERARY (continued)

21. Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...warm, funny, and supremely original new novel... The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school - when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria - his social doom is sealed for the next four years. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is." - Amazon.

22. Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan. Knopf. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...tender story of friendship, a witty take on liberal arts colleges, and a fascinating portrait of the first generation of women who have all the opportunities in the world, but no clear idea about what to choose. Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn't have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with her grandmother's rosary beads in hand and a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiancé she left behind in Savannah; Sally, pristinely dressed in Lilly Pulitzer, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a 'Riot: Don't Diet' T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately." - Amazon.

23. Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle edition $13.20. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Few if any novelists have captured Washington politics with the astute insights of Just, who here casts his dispassionate eye on a man who comes to question whether one can achieve a well-lived life on the outskirts of political action. Born and bred to the political arena, Alec Malone, son of a powerhouse U.S. senator, becomes an outsider twice removed, first by choosing photography as his profession and then by turning down an assignment in Vietnam. Content with his wife Lucia, the daughter of a Czech refugee, Alec dislikes the neighborhood cocktail parties, where a cosmopolitan mix of émigrés and exiles makes Lucia aware of the cultural chasm running through her marriage. Alec is devastated when she leaves him and bemused when, much later, his daughter follows in Senator Malone's footsteps, though it's the sudden appearance of Lucia's long-lost father that provokes Alec to question the meaning of an existence that has avoided the barricades." - Publishers Weekly.

24. Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead. Algonquin Books. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. The terrain is unforgiving, the intense heat and dust both relentless and overpowering. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Napoleon has weathered the storms of battle with a toughness that has become like a second skin, with the Rattler, a horse who’s as flinty and seasoned as he. But this time, Napoleon can’t control one of his young soldiers who has a penchant for reckless, dramatic actions - and who singlehandedly, in his desire to prove himself, makes a move that is the beginning of the end." - from the inside flap of the print edition.

25. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Random House. Kindle edition $7.20. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of 1974, a summer 'hot and serious and full of death and betrayal,' and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives - a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge." - Amazon.

26. Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant. Random House. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God’s protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa Caterina’s new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core. Ripped by her family from an illicit love affair, sixteen-year-old Serafina is willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant - young enough to have a life to look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut short. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is dispatched to the girl’s cell to sedate her. Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the clever, scholarly nun, for whom the girl becomes the daughter she will never have." - from the hardcover edition.

27. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"As richly modulated as MacArthur fellow Adichie’s hard-hitting novels are, her short stories are equally well-tooled and potent. As her first collection arcs between Nigeria and the U.S., Adichie takes measure of the divide between men and women and different classes and cultures. A meticulous observer of tactile detail and emotional nuance, Adichie moves sure-footedly from the personal to the communal as she illuminates with striking immediacy the consequences of prejudice, corruption, tyranny, and violence in war-torn Nigeria and unaware America..." - Donna Seaman for Booklist.

CRIME

28. Cold in Hand by John Harvey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle edition $13.73. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In 10 novels over 10 years (1989–1998), Charlie Resnick, the jazz-loving police detective, made Nottingham's turf familiar to readers who never came within 1,000 miles of it. Now... an older Charlie on the cusp of retirement makes a welcome and brilliant return. A pair of murder investigations form a knotty tangle, reflecting nasty changes in Nottingham: the first a gang dispute resulting in a fatal shooting, the second the murder of an East European prostitute imported for the sex trade. The latter case collides with a separate inquiry mounted by the SOCA (Serious and Organized Crime Agency). As always, Harvey handles the police procedural aspects with easy competence. But the characterization shines brightest as the thoroughly decent, competent Charlie navigates the treacherous waters of his profession that threaten to swamp his personal life." - Publishers Weekly.

29. Eclipse by Richard North Patterson. Henry Holt and Co. Kindle edition $7.29. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Damon Pierce is a gifted California lawyer whose work is starting to seem soulless. Then, from out of nowhere, two life-altering events take place: First, Damon’s wife announces that she’s leaving him. Next: A woman from his past reappears. Damon could never forget Marissa Brand Okari, his one-time great love. Now, she’s in trouble ...and Damon decides to do everything in his power to help her. Marissa’s husband, Bobby Okari, is a freedom fighter in a corrupt west African nation - one that’s being torn apart by global lust for its vast supply of oil. One day, during a solar eclipse, Bobby leads a high-profile protest rally against an American oil company only to see everyone in his home village massacred by government troops. Already an enemy of the country’s savage dictator, Bobby is promptly arrested. Now it’s up to Damon to take on Bobby’s case and save him - and Marissa - from almost certain death." - us.macmillan.com.

30. Fatal Lies by Frank Tallis. Random House. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"A dogged police inspector and an insightful young psychiatrist match wits with depraved criminal minds in this acclaimed mystery series set in Freud’s Vienna. In glittering turn-of-the-century Vienna, brutal instinct and refined intellect fight for supremacy. The latest, most disturbing example: the mysterious and savage death of a young cadet in the most elite of military academies, St. Florian’s. Even using his cutting-edge investigative techniques, Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt cannot crack the school’s closed and sadistic world. He must again enlist the aid of his frequent ally, Dr. Max Liebermann, an expert in Freudian psychology. But how can Liebermann help when he a crisis of his own: handling his conflicted and forbidden feelings for two different women, one a former patient? As the case unfolds, powerful forces will stop at nothing to keep a dark secret." - Amazon.

31. Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan. Putnam. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Harry Dolan's droll and delightful first novel opens with a simple, ominous sentence: 'The shovel has to meet certain requirements.' This suggests the shovel in question may be intended for other than routine gardening chores. It suggests that, well, bad things may happen, which they soon do, in profusion. We learn that a man who calls himself David Loogan is in a store buying the shovel, rather furtively, and that he is an editor for a crime magazine called Gray Streets in Ann Arbor, Mich. We learn that he has bought the shovel because his boss, Tom Kristoll, the owner of the magazine, wants him to help bury a body. That's the first bad thing that happens..." - Patrick Anderson for The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com.

32. An Expensive Education by Nick McDonell. Atlantic Monthly Press. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"... a smart, relentless novel set at the troubled intersection of ivory academia and realpolitik. Professor Susan Lowell has it made. A happily married mother of two in a tenure-track job at Harvard, she has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book lionizing Hatashil, an East African freedom fighter. David Ayan is her singular Somali-born student. He is trying to become a member of one of Harvard’s elite finals clubs. He is trying to understand Jane, his girlfriend from a privileged background. He is trying, sometimes, just to get by in a foreign place. Michael Teak is a twenty-five-year-old recent Harvard grad working as an American intelligence operative who meets Hatashil in David’s village minutes before the massacre that will upend all their lives." - Amazon.

33. Rules of the Game by Leonard Downie Jr.. Knopf. Kindle edition $14.23. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"From Leonard Downie Jr., longtime editor of The Washington Post, an eye-opening novel of corruption, deception, and intrigue in our nation’s capital. Sarah Page, a rising star at the Washington Capital, has been assigned to cover the dark world of politics and money in Washington. But when she begins to investigate an influential lobbyist and his clients, she realizes that little is what it seems. As Sarah digs deeper, one of her sources is murdered and others disappear. She herself is the target of a car bomb, and a late-night caller warns that she is jeopardizing national security. And while she is determined to pursue the story wherever it leads, her own romantic indiscretions leave her vulnerable...
No one knows more about Washington, its inner workings and secrets than Leonard Downie Jr. And no novel has better captured the tensions among business interests, politicians, and the press, or the morally ambiguous ways in which all three really work. " - from the hardcover edition.

34. The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly. Little, Brown and Company. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career. He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent." - Amazon.

35. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. Penguin. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In an unnamed city always slick with rain, Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at a huge, imperious detective agency. All he knows about solving mysteries comes from the reports he's filed for the illustrious detective Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing and his supervisor turns up murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective, a rank for which he lacks both the skills and the stomach. His only guidance comes from his new assistant, who would be perfect if she weren?t so sleepy, and from the pithy yet profound Manual of Detection (think The Art of War as told to Damon Runyon)." - Amazon.

36. The Last Child by John Hart. Minotaur Books. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...John Hart's third novel covers only a few days in the life of a North Carolina town, but the minutes all seem breathless. Every few chapters bring new twists and startling revelations: another girl's disappearance, bodies and then more bodies, a surprising series of connections that casts new light on everything that's come before and throws darkening shadows over what's ahead. The young boy at the story's center is a magnificent creation, Huck Finn channeled through 'Lord of the Flies,' and as a detective in his own right he proves as driven and passionate as any mystery fan could hope for..." - Art Taylor for The Washington Post.

37. Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard. HarperCollins. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Jack Foley - remember him as played by George Clooney in Out of Sight? - is serving a thirty-year sentence in a Miami penitentiary, but he's made an unlikely friend on the inside who just might be able to do something about that. Fellow inmate Cundo Rey, an extremely wealthy Cuban criminal, arranges for Foley's sentence to be reduced from thirty years to three months, and when Jack is released just two weeks ahead of Cundo, he agrees to wait for him in Venice Beach, California. Also waiting for Cundo is his common-law wife, Dawn Navarro, a professional psychic with a slightly ulterior motive for staying with Cundo... Road Dogs is Elmore Leonard at his best - with his trademark tight plotting and pitch-perfect dialogue..." - Amazon.

SCIENCE FICTION

38. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. HarperCollins. Kindle edition $7.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
Newbery Medal winner for 2009.
"While a highly motivated killer murders his family, a baby, ignorant of the horrific goings-on but bent on independence, pulls himself out of his crib and toddles out of the house and into the night. This is most unfortunate for the killer, since the baby was his prime target. Finding his way through the barred fence of an ancient graveyard, the baby is discovered by Mr. and Mrs. Owens, a stable and caring couple with no children of their own—and who just happen to be dead. After much debate with the graveyard’s rather opinionated denizens, it is decided that the Owenses will take in the child. Under their care and the sponsorship of the mysterious Silas, the baby is named “Nobody” and raised among the dead to protect him from the killer, who relentlessly pursues him. This is an utterly captivating tale that is cleverly told through an entertaining cast of ghostly characters." - Holly Koelling for Booklist.

39. Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America by Robert Charles Wilson. Tor Books. Kindle edition $13.70. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...a kind of skewed steampunk novel set in a postcollapse, imperial United States returned to 19th-century technology and mores. Julian Comstock, the disgraced nephew of the tyrannical American president, grows up in a small town in what was formerly northern Canada. Adam Hazzard, Julian's working-class friend, and Sam Godwin, a bluff old retainer and secret Jew, struggle to keep Julian alive despite his uncle's hatred and Julian's proclivity for annoying the repressive Dominion Church. When Julian is drafted to fight the invading Dutch in Labrador, exaggerated tales of his heroism, written by would-be novelist Adam, catapult the young aristocrat to unwanted fame." - Publishers Weekly.

40. Daeman by Daniel Suarez. Dutton. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer-the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company's stock price. But Sobol's fans aren't the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol's secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it's up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy... Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson." - Amazon.

41. The Price of Spring by Daniel Abraham. Tor Books. Kindle edition $14.78. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
The fourth and final book of the Long Price Quartet that began with A Shadow in Summer.
"Fifteen years have passed since the devastating war between the Galt Empire and the cities of the Khaiem in which the Khaiem’s poets and their magical power known as 'andat' were destroyed, leaving the women of the Khaiem and the men of Galt infertile. The emperor of the Khaiem tries to form a marriage alliance between his son and the daughter of a Galtic lord, hoping the Khaiem men and Galtic women will produce a new generation to help create a peaceful future. But Maati, a poet who has been in hiding for years, driven by guilt over his part in the disastrous end of the war, defies tradition and begins training female poets. With Eiah, the emperor’s daughter, helping him, he intends to create andat, to restore the world as it was before the war. Vanjit, a woman haunted by her family’s death in the war, creates a new andat. But hope turns to ashes as her creation unleashes a power that cripples all she touches. As the prospect of peace dims under the lash of Vanjit’s creation, Maati and Eiah try to end her reign of terror. But time is running out for both the Galts and the Khaiem." - Amazon.