“OK, that kid is TOTALLY freakin’ me out!”
Popeye finds himself in an anime tale and reacts pretty much how I would. But with spinach.
Month: November 2004
Destroying Iraq to Save It
An American general in Vietnam famously said, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” This has become the definitive expression of the macabre futility of war. Last week, we destroyed an entire city in order to save it (progress!), but our capacity to find that sort of thing ironic seems to have become shriveled and harmless.
Who Took My Frog
The lostfrog.org internet meme turns out to be about a toy frog from McDonalds, not a real frog, and it was lost by a 16 year old autistic boy, not a small child.
Lost stuffed animals are really sad. My son’s most beloved, security-providing, always-with-him object was a stuffed lion (named Lion), given to him for his first birthday by my mom. He took it with him when we visited Iowa City this spring/summer, and it got lost. We at first thought it was in the hotel, but they never found it (they sent us a different stuffed lion that they found…), and we now suspect that it was lost somewhere in downtown Iowa City, maybe near the park.
That was a lot for a three year old to bear, especially when the hotel told us they found it and they mailed it to us and we went to pick it up and we opened the box and it wasn’t Lion, it was some other lion.
I’d pay a lot to get that lion back.
I’ve considered trying to find a duplicate but I don’t know what brand it was or anything; all I know is it was bought two and a half years ago at Wal-mart or something. And I’m not sure a duplicate would help.
Quote of the Day
I may revel in the fact that all of cyberspace, offering all its manifold transactions, is available through this small window on my desk. It is well to remember, however, that until recently most windows mediating the world to us in such a restrictive fashion had steel bars in them.
From “The Future Does Not Compute,” which I’d like to read sometime but I don’t know where to get a hardcopy and I dunno if I can deal with reading it online.
Kill Rebels for Palpatine
So in this forge thread Clinton R. Nixon (designer of a neat Jedi-biting game called Paladin) advances following thesis:
Any good RPG can, with a minimum of effort, be used to play Jedi.
Clinton then challenged people to give him RPGs and he’d outline a minimal Jedi conversion. The first funny one was Kill Puppies for Satan: “Kill Rebels for Palpatine.” The prospect of an Ewok massacre made many posters happy.
And let’s not forget My Life With Master Yoda.
Mike Holmes drops in and almost kills the thread by being what he later describes as “an anal retentive fuckhead,” but he manages to resurrect it with an apology (in which he thus describes himself) and everyone including himself being friendly and decent.
It eventually became a challenge to find a decent game that couldn’t be used for a great jedi game, and nobody succeeded. Even some apparent failures (Breaking The Ice, a game about first dates) became successes with a little creativity (BTI turns out to work for playing out chunks of Star Wars as Luke and Leia’s “first date.”)
This is why I love the Forge. :)