Case Mods

Inspired by this post on Apathy Curve I was led to do some quick looking, and what did I find?

Two new cool/interesting retro case mods.

1960's style Sputnik 0667

And the Art Deco style Aerodyne

While a Steampunk style casemod is still my ideal, I have to admit I would love to have one of these as well, especially the Aerodyne.

Moonlight Sonata

Ran across this interesting visualization for Moonlight Sonata produced by someone on YouTube.  The person made it with some of their own "custom software" and Blender.  They've also created visualizations for a few other musical pieces.  Have a look see. Best Viewed in full screen.

SCIENCE!

The YouTube description says it all....

"Weirdest Chemical Reaction I have Ever Freaking Seen"

Blog Remodeling

Google has been working to create tighter integration among their different offerings, so I figured it was time to go in and do some remodeling on the blog, relocate my MT-DOOM.NET domain to Google's App Hosting service, and do some general tidying up.  Time will tell how well this all works out.  I do like some of the new appearance tweaks I've been able to make to the blog, and it's nice to be able to tie management into my MT-DOOM accounts.  Later I may venture into trying to merge my google+ stuff into it as well.

The Occupy Wall Street Generation

Preach on brother Carolla!

Geek Alert

The Fates smiled upon me. I managed to replace a couple of long lost games this week; Security Station & Car Wars. Some of the regulars may recall a series of "microgames" that were published back in the late 70's early 80's. They were produced by startup gaming companies and sold in small hand sized cardboard or plastic boxes (sometimes ziplock bags) to keep the packaging costs down and sold for around $5. The contents were usually just a fine-print rulebook, some cardboard chits to represent players of adversaries, and a fold-out hex or grid paper playing board. But despite the meager physical contents, a lot of these games had fantastic gameplay. Usually designed and published by people who where avid gamers themselves.

Metagaming Concepts, based in Austin Texas, launched the first line of micrograms. They produced a long list of titles like Melee, Advanced Melee and Wizard as part of what they called The Fantasy Trip line that used the core rules from the initial Melee system. One of these Fantasy Trip games was called Security Station: a post nuclear game (1-6 players) where you explore a deadly abandoned automated...Security Station.



Being a child of the Cold War and brought up on all sorts of Post Holocaust SciFi stories and movies I immediately gravitated to this one. No idea what happened to the original one, missing some 25-30 years now. Its very hard to find one these days in good condition with all parts, so I was thrilled to stumble across on in Very Fine condition. I look forward to trying it out.

One of Metagaming's best designers (Steve Jackson, creator of Metagaming's hit OGRE) left to start his own company, Steve Jackson Games. Metagaming folded but SJ continues on today.


One of his first biggest hits was Car Wars, best described as automotive gladiatorial games with machine guns, missiles, grenade launchers, etc. Jar(egg)head was actually the person to first turn me on to Car Wars. I lost my original 1983 microgame copy (the one that came in the hardshell black plastic box) in one of my moves but managed to find well maintained replacement (with 4 supplements). I'm giving serious consideration to taking it to ComicPalooza this year to get Steve Jackson to sign it.

Steampunk House

If I ever manage to have all of the free time I want and still maintain all the income I would need to do the things I would like with all that free time...THIS is one of the things I would do.

Paul

If you liked Shaun of the Dead and HotFuzz you should put this on you list to see come February 2011.




p.s. Yes, I know, things have been quite around here for a few months...will be trying to find time to do more in the new year.