Category: Geekery

Foolish Ideas: The Return

Getting other people to do all the hard work…

I’ve been boning up lately (oh stop laughing, that’s a perfectly legitimate phrase!) on the world of Hellboy, having used some tax return money and birthday book vouchers to buy Darkness Calls, Abe Sapien: The Drowning, BPRD: Killing Ground, The Hellboy Companion and the special edition of The Golden Army. As a result the nebulous mental space I use to store details of whatever fictional world I’m currently mainlining is stuffed to the gills with the big red guy and his colleagues.

This explains why when I read that an open source version of that old classic Wolfenstein 3D has been ported to the iPhone my immediate thought was “Hey! A Wolfenstein mod would make a pretty good Hellboy game!”

(Here comes the madness…)

You see, the history of Hellboy computer games has been plagued with bug ridden piles of garbage and adequate though hardly inspired beat-em-ups. So how better to fix the problem than to make some modifications to one of the most consistently popular and influential games of all time?

I mean think about it. Wolfenstein is all about running around a mysterious castle, shooting Nazis and stopping their fiendish attempts to raise a robotic zombie army. Could you come up with a more archetypal Hellboy adventure? All you need to do is swap out some of the graphics and bingo!

As for the plot? Well the BPRD sends Hellboy in to investigate reports of strange activity in the ruins of Castle Wolfenstein – rumoured to have been the site of experiments associated with Project Ragna-Rok back in World War II. He discovers an abandoned laboratory full strange equipment and inadvertently activates a primitive time travel device which throws him back to 1943. He has to fight his way through the castle back to the laboratory and get back to the present day.

Replace the faces in the health meter, add the Right Hand of Doom as a weapon, make the zombies look like the ones in the basement of Hunte Castle, swap out the bosses with Rasputin, Von Klempt and Kroenen and there you go! Hours of Nazi-smashing fun!

(You’d leave robo-Hitler in there untouched, obviously)

If I had the time I’d take a shot at it myself. Of course I don’t have the time, so I’m releasing the idea into the wild in the hopes someone out there is similarly enthused. Which they probably won’t be. But hey, at least I’m making an effort 😀

Hellboy in Wolfenstein? (Click to Enlarge)

Reminisces

Don’t talk to me about the Kings of Leon!

The Kings of Leon. The Kings of Leon were a pack of bastards. Obsessed with reconquering Iberia from the Moors. “Hey” I’d say to them “The Moors aren’t that bad. They’re people just like you”. “But they’re evil!” they’d say “The Pope says so!” and how can you really argue against the Pope?

The Kings of Aragon were just as bad, with the added complication of an appalling amount of inbreeding. Knock-kneed, hump-backed dwarves the lot of them. And the lisps! A five minute conversation with one of them and you’d need a shower and change of clothes. And believe me, showering facilities in 12th century Zaragoza weren’t exactly up to scratch.

The food was great though – Aragon had the best cooks in the whole of Iberia. A meal at the royal court was almost worth all the spit. Some people will tell you the palace of Cordova was the place for fine cuisine, but the Umayyads had nothing on the cooks of Aragon. The things they could do with a duck, some cloves and some oranges would make you weep.

Charlemagne, he was a decent sort. Great company – the stories he could tell! I remember one time he had the whole Synod of Frankfurt in hysterics with a story about a gluttonous donkey. His one big regret was never learning to write properly. “Charlie” I’d say “You’ve got scribes to handle that for you”, but he was always embarrassed about it. “Even Abul can write better than I!” he’d exclaim and throw his quill (or when drunk – as he often was – his flagon) across the room, and his wife would have to talk him down and remind him that Abul was an elephant and hence couldn’t write at all. But apart from that he was a great bloke.

Can’t say the same about Pippin, but that’s another story.

Apparently he was on the Enclave payroll all along…

Change the world a little bit.

Anyone who visits this blog regularly (not that I necessarily believe such a curious beast to exist) will have noticed a lot of activity lately. This is because I am “Making an Effort”. I’m trying my best to write something every night just to keep my hand in, and to try and catch up to Helen who recently hit 600 posts despite her blog being younger than mine. Such a discrepancy cannot be allowed to stand! *grin*

That being said, I am extremely tired after a hard week’s work trying to interpret the heavily accented mumblings of a man who looks uncannily like the Vault Overseer from the original Fallout (I keep expecting him to ask me to find a water chip), and have very little stomach for writing. So this entry will be short, if not necessarily sweet.

I will say before going however that if you have any money spare (a rare occurrence in this time of economic crisis I know) or you just feel like being charitable, there are a lot worse causes to send your money to than that of Hollis Hawthorne. Rather than try and compose an explanation in my own words I shall liberally quote from the post on Whitechapel (by one Theremina) that alerted me and many others to her plight…

[Hollis Hawthorne] is a performer, cyclist, and activist who lives in SF. I only kinda sorta barely know her through mutual friends, but by all accounts, she’s just the most radiant, beautiful person. She moves in many of the same circles I do, and has donated her time to many of the same nonprofit events.

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury.

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’s mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, her case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world … All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching out to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000, and more is pouring in all the time, mostly in small denominations. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten? It adds up more quickly than you’d think!

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If, in some small way, we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, we really should. Click here to help, and please spread the word, if you can. This is what the internet is for.

Now yes, that all sounds like some kind of more creative than normal Nigerian mail scam, but it’s all on the level and – while her situation has improved with movement to a much better hospital and she’s starting to show signs of recovery – money to get her home is still desperately needed. So, if you feel like doing something good for the world and helping out a stranger – not to mention being part of a growing group of helpers and well-wishers scattered all around the world, click on the link above. If not, whatever.

That’s my good deed for the week. Denys sleep now.

The Ghost Who Lurks

Wheelchair bound freaks!

I am by nature a lurker. Rather than being involved with things I prefer to stand on the fringes looking in. If I won the lottery (not likely since I never buy a ticket) and decided to hire a nightclub to throw a big party for all my friends (well what would you do if you won the lottery then?), I’d spend most of it sitting in the office keeping half an eye on things through the security cameras. Like I said, a lurker.

The reason I mention this is because it explains my attitude to forums. I keep an eye on quite a few forums, but I am not a member of any of them. I just drop in and check the threads, often on a daily basis. And 90% of the time that’s fine. I feel no social impulse to jump in and take part and feel in no way deprived, isolated or left out.

Occasionally however I come across a thread where I’d actually have something to contribute. An idea, or a comment, or some experience relevant to the subject being discussed. It’s times like this that I wish I was a member of the board – not enough to actually sign up – but enough to be mildly irritated at my inability to contribute.

So, what better to do than ‘contribute’ through my blog? Sure, the people on the boards may never see it, and probably wouldn’t care if they did (apart from wondering who this anti-social weirdo is) but at least it gets the ideas out of my head.

So that’s what I’m going to do here.

The board in question is Whitechapel, one of the domains of Warren Ellis (King of the Internet), and the thread is the latest “Remake/Remodel” challenge. Rather than go to the trouble of explaining what this is, I’ll be lazy and let Warren explain it…

So, every week or two, I set all the artists at my message board a challenge called REMAKE/REMODEL. I pick a character — usually some ancient pulp character from the claggy depths of the public domain — and tell the artists to reinterpret said character from a modern perspective.

This week he selected a certain Ivan Brodsky (Note: At least one of the remodels is seriously not safe for work, or anyone of a sensitive disposition. You have been warned).

Now, I’m no artist. I can – if I try very hard – draw something that probably wouldn’t be laughed out of town, but it certainly wouldn’t be applauded either. But I have a very good idea of what I’d try to draw if I could draw, and if I was a member of Whitechapel, and will describe it here in a ‘pen portrait’.

(Yes, I realise Warren specifically outlaws pen portraits and hence would be likely to set his eels on me if I tried this kind of crap in his thread. But this isn’t his thread, it’s a blog post aimed in the general direction of his thread, so I think I can claim a certain amount of immunity. I hope. Get the iron trousers Marion! 🙂

So imagine if you will, a wizened figure in an electric wheelchair. His withered body is strapped in and his oversize head is held up with braces. The left side of his body and face are scarred and burnt, and his left arm hangs limply. His right arm grasps the joystick that drives his mechanical conveyance. Hung around his neck are the sacred insignia of a multiple faiths. A crucifix, a hand of Fatima, a seal of David, a Khanda and a dozen others.

Various metal rods and wires stick out of the left side of his bald head which is heavily scarred. His left eye is clearly artificial, a bulging, oversize globe painted with a spiraling, hypnotic pattern. His remaining eye has a piercing, penetrating quality with more than a suggestion of madness…

Dr Ivan Brodsky was a brilliant, if amoral brain surgeon who was the only survivor of an operating theatre explosion. Flying surgical instruments severed his spine and were driven deep into his brain, altering his neural pathways to let him perceive things men were not meant to see! His patented hypno-eye(tm) was a later innovation to enhance his hypnotic abilities.

Eat your heart out Stan Lee! 😀

So yeah. The pine nut curse has dissipated (for now), I’m busy cataloging and sorting the photos of my UK trip back in 2004 and uploading them to Flickr and I saw Watchmen yesterday which I quite enjoyed despite leaving my glasses at home and hence having to watch the entire film through my sunglasses. Apart from that it’s business as usual at the Wyrmcave. Boring, awful normal ;D

That is all.

Anyone who tries to hug me will be shot dead…

Some general updates

Every week I like Miki more and more. Mind you, she’s been my favourite FreakAngel ever since her first appearance, it’s just that the more we see of her the more my initial opinion is confirmed.

Of course Kait is growing on me too.

I do have to ask though – in the last frame is that a tentacle?!

OK, enough FreakAngels (except to say that the Google Earth file has been updated).

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and put Abandoned in Perth out of its misery. It’s been sitting in a state of abandonment (how ironic!) for almost five years, and I while I’ve been taking photos of plenty of derelict sites I just haven’t had the time to process them all and get them up.

I haven’t abandoned the concept however, as almost all the photos from the site (and a whole lot more) are now up on my Flickr account. Flickr makes everything so much easier, so expect the Abandoned in Perth collection to grow and grow! (Assuming that is that I can find more places to photograph).

OK, that’s all for now.

(Ah! It’s art!)

Flickr Mania

Photo fest…

Well I somehow seem to have managed to avoid pneumonia. Good. Work is currently hellish however, so I haven’t had much time to do anything let alone write any decent blog entries.

I have however been easing my frazzled nerves at the end of the day by uploading a whole bunch of old photos to my Flickr account. Most notably of the derelict South Fremantle Power Station and the old ANI Foundry in the same area.

I’ve also put up a few pics of Perth’s sad attempt at a Chinatown, photos of William Street before the whole place was demolished for the railway and an absolutely massive spider.

Enjoy!

Getting annoyed about nothing at all

The people of central Massachusetts are seriously letting the side down.

Being a chronically over-educated and pedantic curmudgeon I sometimes find myself getting extremely annoyed about things of little consequence at all. Currently causing my blood to, if not boil certainly simmer, is an article in that renowned organ the Worcester Telegram and Gazette News, which has served the people of central Massachusetts since 1986.

The article is actually pretty good news – a woman (allegedly) abducted her granddaughter and was tracked down with the help of cell phone co-ordinates and Google Maps. What’s annoying me is the apparent complete ignorance of the authors regarding something as simple as reading co-ordinates off a map.

I quote…

“It then became a back and forth effort between the cell phone company, the police officer and Deputy Chief Lozier, who received latitude and longitude coordinates and triangulated them to learn where the two missing people were.”

So Deputy Chief Lozier “triangulated” the latitude and longitude? I find this hard to believe.

Triangulation is the process of taking bearings from two or more known locations towards an unknown location, and plotting said bearings to determine the position of said unknown location (where the bearings cross). A deceptively simple process, it was absolutely crucial to the making of accurate maps before the development of aerial and satellite photography, and remains important in cartography, navigation and the tracking of radio signals.

It is not used however in reading latitude and longitude off a map, which is a simple process of finding the appropriate markings on the margins and tracing them to where they cross, something even a child can do with minimal instruction.

To the authors of the article however reading co-ordinates off a map (not that you even have to do this if you’re using Google Maps) is apparently a strange and arcane science, involving high level mathematics and possibly the sacrifice of a goat – as opposed to simply “looking” and “reading”. Such a complicated process needs a suitably grand title, and “triangulation” fits the bill because it has something to do with maps and no-one (or at least no one who reads or works at the Telegram and Gazette) really knows what it means anyway.

This frankly is sloppy journalism. Sure, I understand the need to simplify concepts for publication and that a newspaper is no place for a detailed exploration of cartographic techniques, but a certain level of accuracy in terminology is surely not too much to aspire to? To refer to reading co-ordinates off a map as “triangulation” is akin to referring to a horse as a mule – sure they’re related, but no editor would let such a slip get through to print.

So yeah, that’s what’s annoying me at the moment – the general ignorance of the population in relation to basic cartographic and geometric terminology. Honestly, it’s like they’re not even trying. 🙂

Back to work tomorrow. Urgh.

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