200 WEST 40th STREET – Ohhhhh, comics.  I love ya, I love ya.  After a long day of making grim decisions and dealing with mankind, it’s so nice to pick up a glossy folio where all of life is reduced to GOOD and BAD.   A copy of Secret Six, a Singapore Sling, maybe some Call me Poupée, and I’m a happily anesthetized little, fuzzy, man-child.

Ho ho.  Good times in the Money Manse.

But not everyone loves comics the way I love comics.  And that is terrible.

No worries, though, I -as ever- am here to help.

Over the next five (5) weeks I’ll bring you a few general tips and some specific recommendations to get you and keep you into comics once and for all.

…continue reading Get into comics… The Cash Money Way! Part 1: The Life and Times of $crooge McDuck

Tags: Aesthetiophilia, Pictoriphilia // Add Comment »

I’m mostly interested in writing about Things Worth Having, which make up for their cost in improved Quality of Life. I usually mean high-quality every-day objects when I say that but there’s also a bunch of intangible data worth having. Some people even give it away. Data (i.e. software) takes up no space, so when someone gives a piece of software away, it’s hard not to see it as Worth Having, even if it sucks. At first glance that’s how the math comes out. The cost, however, is the time you spend using it. And it is in that spirit that I give you A Buncha Free Games, Volume I.

Capt. Forever
I’m now officially belaboring this point, but it’s just so good. And now that Capt. Successor is out, you can play the original for free. Now. NOW. (Read the rest later, damn you. That link will open in a new tab.)

Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari)

When Darwinia+ finally comes out I’ll try and explain how much I hate genre-boundaries, because I hate them. Books, music, films, and games that transgress and can’t be classified are lots more fun. Cave Story is a fast, pixelated platformer with RPG-ish NPC development, a nice big inventory, and a story that just goes on and on. (Disclosure: I haven’t completed a single game in this post because they’re all so satisfyingly long.) My point is that if you haven’t played it before, you haven’t played it before. Its not Mario or Metroid, Duke Nukem (THE FIRST ONE) or Commander Keen. It’s cute, the music’s excellent, and the controls are flawless. It’s clearly a labor of love by the author, and you can download it for free and keep it forever. I think you should.
Win – Mac – Linux

Knytt

Every bit as atmospheric as Canabalt, but not nearly as intense. Well, that’s not fair. The little Knytt got abducted by an incompetent alien and now has to fix the broken spaceship without help. It’s a quiet, beautiful puzzle platform/adventure-thing that is massively cute in a way that makes the solitude of crawling around alone on an alien world seem all the more dire. Again, it’s an ingenious labor of love and totally downloadable, along with its extensible successor, Knytt Stories.
Win – and I run it on my CrunchBang Linux netbook through Wine

Monuments of Mars

This game is so old! Do you even know what CGA graphics are? It’s amazing what you can do with two bits-per-pixel, provided they’re the right two bits. These ones give you Black, Red, Orange, and Green. Monuments of Mars is my favorite exploration of just how much awesome can be gleaned from four colors, and I just found out that all four chapters have been released into the public domain.
YOUR COMPUTER CAN’T RUN THIS GAME! You need to get DOSBOX first so you both can pretend it’s 1992.

ZZT

I know, I’m trying to run you over with my time machine. ZZT is another absurd blast-from-the-past. Think 4 colors looks primitive? ZZT is all ASCII characters. We care because Tim Sweeney released it almost 20 years ago, and now is still Head Morlock behind the Unreal Engine, which runs Mass Effect, BioShock, Dead Space, Gears of War, Borderlands, Mirror’s Edge, Deus Ex… It all started with ridiculous DOS text characters. In all seriousness, you don’t have to play this game, but it did have a really slick scripting system that made it really easy to build mods. The level editors in Lode Runner and Boulder Dash didn’t hold a candle.
DOSBOX

Tags: Aesthetiophilia, Methodology, Technophilia, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

I’ll be gone from KORB on Vimeo.

Excellent video from two of Lithuania’s finest house producers, Mario Basanov and Vidis.  The melding of sounds with visuals in this video creates a wonderful synesthesia that just jumps right of the page.  I’m used to light traveling in particles and waves simultaneously, but sound…that’s sorcery.

Tags: Audiophilia, Videophilia // Add Comment »

Subcategory: Failure

Norwegian and UK man fail in death appeal in DR Congo

BBC, Dec. 3, 2009

“Dude, Where’s My Car” sequel goes horribly awry when pair of Norwegian bachelor farmers former members of Norway’s armed forces try to set up a private security firm in the DR Congo.

One dead taxi driver later, the pair is charged with murder, espionage, spying (which is different than espionage, I guess), and arms smuggling.  Cue the torture, the lack of translators, and witnesses getting paid “$5,000 each in compensation in a country where people earn about $3-4 a day.”

Death by firing squad scheduled for Sept. 8.

UPDATE, 12/4/09, DR Congo: “Did we say firing squad? We meant… tiring… blob.  Of.  Jam.  We like… jam.  Yes.  Please don’t bomb us.”

Norway denies all accusations of espionage.

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Ahh, the classics. I can’t believe I’ve neglected to include this in the Friday line up so far. Hayao Miyazaki‘s Nausicaa. It’s entirely probable that you’ve seen this already, but I can’t help but give due deference to one of the more formative films of my life.

Picture, if you will, a young boy growing up media-less in the wilderness of Northern New England in the early eighties. When one day his family discovers it’s possible to rent a VCR for the weekend; they’d only had two broadcast channels up until then.

Yes, I said VCR, stop snickering.

This was one of the first films they rented. I can’t suppose what stroke of fate led them to it, a Father’s love of Scifi and a passion to impart it to his children, or perhaps a desire to ride out the impending blizzard with the comfort of animation. Nevertheless. There was the young Etruscan (if such a thing could be said to exist), camped out during the worst storm of the year with a bowl of popcorn at the foot of the couch, marveling at this new piece of technology and watching what is frequently referred to as one of Miyazaki’s greatest works; the boy’s first exposure to anime. I can recall that the Father was so impressed that by the end of the weekend, before the VCR had to be returned, every neighborhood child (all three!) had been around to the house to watch it with us. Not to mention educated about ecological disaster.

And after that, we watched Weird Science. Booyah!

The odd thing is, sometimes I still dream of these images.

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