Happy International Towel Day, and less hoopy matters...
Happy International Towel Day! You can talk like a pirate, if you want, but all that's really important is that you know where your towel is. Scroll down the above page for Towel Day festivities in your area (as well as others). I'm fully behind the work of Adams as well as all the good and fun stuff being done in his name, but the biggest reason I'm leading off with this item is that it nearly always seems that the geeky holidays fall on the days of the week when I'm not doing a blog update, and by Zarquon I'm grabbing this one by the... whatever it is a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal has in lieu of a tail.
It would seem that Kansas City and its environs is developing a new ecological norm that ranges somewhere between "wet, cold spring" and "the Red Spot on Jupiter, with hail." My lawn looks like a jungle not because I can't find time to mow, but because the rain hasn't let up long enough to let the grass dry out, which results in me having to halt my old Lawn Boy every minute or so, as the area under the cowl yet again looks like I mowed over a small creature made of canned spinach. We had plans to go to a little riverside picnic-y area over Memorial Day weekend, though I'm beginning to wonder not just if the picnic area is underwater, but if the highways there are still there. This isn't to make light of the tragedy in Joplin, Missouri, by any means (even more striking are these before and after photos. I've spent most of my life in 'Tornado Alley,' and while we're getting more tornadoes than ever, it's not the first time I've lived somewhere that gets hit with the 'smite' button. As a kid, I had a really big fear of storms that could be traced back to one particular storm when I was (I think) about ten. It was one of those heavy rains where it obliterated all but the largest objects from view. We lost a lot of trees in that downpour, and I saw one go over. This, apparently, shattered some Innocence Containment Unit in my brain, and I freaked out over even the mildest storms for years thereafter. I listened to a country radio station almost religiously, not because I liked the music, but because they had some kind of "Radar Weather Center" (probably the AP Wire) with a sound effect lead-in that, to my ears, meant that I was getting the best life-saving information available. I think that phobia may have competed with nuclear war for what I found the most terrifying at the time. Anyway, the wife and I will be going through Josh's once-annoying pile of clothes he's outgrown to send (through Cristi's school) to Joplin, which is still under the threat of more severe weather, as are other states here in 'flyover country.'
In FFN, I joked about using Minecraft for role-playing purposes, but I didn't think to actually look around and see what was being done, beyond a few mods that allowed one to set up events and triggered encounters if you wanted to create an adventure-style game. Thanks to a YouTube video promoing some of their amazing work (I think that's the Mines of Moria at 1:24, isn't it?), I looked at the forums for a group calling itself Godcraft. The name refers to some fantasy lore about their world, and while they're not strictly role-playing, they have a set of rules they'd like crafters to follow (no flying fortresses, don't steal from chests, etc.) as they build and shape the world. It sounds a lot like house rules for many a pen-and-paper game, and it provides some sort of framework that many feel is lacking to Minecraft, along with a collaborative place to start moving blocks about, which is kind of neat. And this is a good place to drop this list of stuff that's going to be updated in the next release this week.
So the creators of the upcoming Candyland movie say it'll be like LOTR, but with candy. I can almost see Gandalf waving a giant toothbrush yelling "YOU... SHALL NOT... FLOSS!" The odd thing is that the writers say they don't see themselves as making a movie about a board game, but instead they're making a fantasy epic in a land made of candy. Could it be fun? It's a possibility. It'll be a little disappointing if it is, in a way, to think that a concept with even a small spark of imagination requires a licensing deal to a product that'll have little to do with the movie. Is this what has to happen to get something that's even a hair different from the norm (and granted, nobody likes hair in their candy)? M'self, I'd like to see a movie based on the old Nuclear War card game, but done by the people who used to put on Spitting Image in the UK.
I think I may have found why I feel so sluggish lately: A bacteria has been discovered that lives on caffeine. I further blame this bacteria for the lapse in judgement that's causing me to post the latest TV trailer/spot for the upcoming 'Smurfs' movie. It's nice to know they hadn't exhausted all of the uncomfortable sexualizing of Smurfette in the previous clips, and it looks like they've got a smurfload of product placement for various toys going on. With films like this, our species might deserve bacteria that eat up all the stuff we love. I'm going to go snuggle with my coffee pot for a while, so here's this in the meantime:
- Seeing that his only other option was to fold, Harold Camping has doubled down on the apocalypse, saying there was an invisible judgement day this past weekend, and that the version with all of the special effects is due October 21st.
- Newest video obsession for my kid: Maru, the internet cat sensation, turned three and has released a compilation video.
- So here's a My Little Pony video that has nothing to do with mashing it up with anything, except perhaps the Laws of Physics, as they apply to ponies (at least ones in cartoons). The presenter has even made his powerpoint materials available via a link in the description, and will probably appear in a college lecture hall near you shortly.
- I never really found Marvel Comics' 'Wolverine' all that intimidating until I saw this. I'd so buy the comic that presented him like that all the way through.
- If you like watching painfully bad videos made to promote restaurants, NYC's 'The Place' has created a pretty good (bad) one. I almost see the Monty Python sub-title of "ACTING!" flashing across the bottom of the screen. :)
- There's a very mindlessly fun game called 'Just Cause 2,' where you spend a lot of your time plummeting (though you have an infinite supply of parachutes). Data on player deaths due to impacts create an interesting map of the islands on which the game takes place.
- Spite Cannon 2 is a game where you earn money via using a cannon to send shapes with faces plummeting to their doom. If that was evil, they wouldn't sell upgrades for doing it, would they?
- Back to tornadoes: Here's footage of a tornado taking on a semi tractor-trailer in Oklahoma. According to where I found this clip, the driver somehow squeaked by with only minor injuries.
- Back to Minecraft: It'll come to the Xperia Play device first, but then Minecraft will be available as a mobile Android app... Notch help us all...
- Even if the gameplay is lobotomy-inducing (and I have no idea if it is or not), seeing the Walking Dead board game makes me nostalgic for the days when there were games churned out for every TV show and movie, along with an accompanying breakfast cereal. Where's my Walking Dead cereal, anyway? It better have gruesome marshmallows and change the color of the milk!
- Has anyone seen "Pirates of the Caribbean 4" yet? Here's a parody from that 'I'm a Marvel, I'm a DC guy.'
- Here's a futuriffic concept vehicle for RV enthusiasts that kind of reminds me of the vehicle The Owl piloted in "Watchmen."
- Okay, it's just too cute to pass up. A 5-year-old girl did some of the voicework and the drawings for Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure. Hey, it's no Axe Cop, but she seems to be getting a college fund out of the deal.
- And while Zombie Crypt is yet another zombie game, the true fun is in mastering a platformer where you control two avatars at once in cooperative play.