Shanoah is off in California hunting the wumpus for the next couple days.

In the meantime, let’s take a break from 80s synth-pop and instead post some Finns who look like they gave too much at the blood drive and playing what my friend Mike likes to call “beard music”. This is Nightwish (MySpace here, Bebo here), a band that my friend Eric clued me into, with The Islander.

Directed by Stobe Harju. Courtesy of Nuclear Blast Europe [1].

I have just one teensy question for you film makers out there: Where the hell is the color? I mean, almost every single movie that I’ve seen of late has been in shot in black, white and muddy shades of blue-grey, and everyone looks like extras from Underworld. I mean, what, did you lose the rest of your colors in the fire?

If perchance you did, I recommend you look into this really neat thing called Technicolor. It’s a little new – only 93 years old or so – but you nutty kids with your soda fountains and your rock and rolling music will love it.

[1] Oh, look! It’s a record label that actually lets you embeds their videos. Well, that’ll never do. People will post their videos on their blogs, sales will skyrocket… it could get nasty folks. Real nasty.

Well, you know Shanoah, if you’re going to use Thomas Dolby to celebrate Nikolai Tesla’s birthday, there’s one song that you absolutely must play.

Hyperactive!

If only for the first six lines, courtesy of LyricWiki:

At the tender age of three
I was hooked to a machine
Just to keep my mouth from spouting junk
Must have took me for a fool
When they chucked me out of school
‘Cause the teacher knew I had the funk

Video courtesy of parkhill62.

We go from sweet and sentimental to yet another Super Furry Animals remake of Tron. This is Play It Cool, off 1997’s Radiator. The song rocks, and the video is mostly a mod for Actua Soccer, which is has the twin benefits of being clever and cheap.

Courtesy once again of rhisfa.

Well, Shanoah, there are plenty of places I could take your last post. Danny Kaye, foxes, The Court Jester, the vessel with the pestle…

But then I heard something about full original series episodes of Star Trek on YouTube and, well, my ADHD kicked into high gear. City on the Edge of Forever! Shiny!

But I can’t help but notice that Star Trek looks a little dated. And the writing, especially in the era of Rick Berman [1], leaves something to be desired. The crackerjack reporters at The Onion noticed this, as well, and filed this story headlined “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’”.

Thanks to my friend George to cluing me into this.

No heavyhanded messages about tolerance [2]? KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Well, I’ll watch it. But if Chris Pine’s Kirk doesn’t throw at least one double axe punch to someone’s back, I’m declaring fatwa and detonating my suicide belt.

[1] Beelzebub has a devil set aside for Rick Berman. Oh yes. His Satanic Majesty has a whole rec room set aside for Rick Berman.

[2] This, as opposed to what the new Star Trek movie looks like from its commercials: “We come in peace! Shoot to kill! Shoot to kill! Shoot to kill!” Star Trek for the War on Terror™ Years, ladies and gentlemen.

Do I remember Dark Castle? Gods, yes. It was one of the few Mac games I owned, and I remember whiling away the time with it in Montclair State University’s computer labs when I should have been studying. The glories of a misspent youth.

Another game that I can blame for my current lack of marketability on the job market is Electronic Arts’ Wasteland.

Screenshot of Commodore 64 port courtesy of DougGlendower.

This game – PC and Apple versions – ate up more of my time than any other actitivity during my late teens/early twenties. It had much the same feel as Bard’s Tale, but without the annoying 3D graphics and with cyborgs, M16’s, crazed new wavers and opponents exploding like blood sausages. Good times.

I didn’t know it yet, but it also had my soon-to-be adopted hometown Las Vegas! From the Wasteland manual, courtesy of the Wasteland wiki The Guardian Library:

Vegas is the city of Las Vegas.  No one is quite sure how the Soviet missiles managed to miss the city, but most folks figure it was because the “house” was betting against a missile landing – and no one wins against the house.  There was an international rumor about some Russian general’s markers being torn up after the attack, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Undaunted by its brush with perdition,  Vegas is still open for business and does very well for itself. The city is large enough to avoid conquest, and many elements of the desert rabble have even found gainful employment as enforcers or casino employees. Despite the relative success of the city, however, there are dark rumors about horrors descending from the north to taking up residence in the city sewers. All may not be extremely well in the jewel of the Desert.

Here’s a sample of the screenplay in one of the first towns, the Agircultural Center, to show you what the gameplay is like.

Courtesy of BloodPigggy.

And here’s a 16-min speed run through Wasteland. According to chaos5482, this run “makes use of the ‘empty loot bag’ bug to get powerful weapons and armor early on”. The items include two items that are otherwise unavailable during the game: the “Red Ryder” weapon, which is almsot a one-shot weapon against all opponents and has unlimited ammo, and the invulernable “NAME AC” armor, always nice to have.

Part 1:

And part 2:

And what am I getting on the same day as the inauguration of the United States’ first black president? That’s right! A root canal! Hope that ain’t a harbinger of things to come… but with the mess that George W. Bush left us, I’m afraid it is.

Anyway, on to today’s post. I actually wrote it less than a week after the election. I was thinking about everything that Barack Obama (“It’s the 2009 President! Now available in black.”) would have to deal with during his administration and all the unfinished business that Bush had left for him. I never was wildly enthusiastic about him as a presidential candidate, and I guess I was reviewing the laundry list of this nation’s woes as an antidote to the exuberance of the time…

And this scene from Star Wars IV: A New Hope just popped into my head.

The message is simple, Mr. President: You have a one-in-a-million shot to fix the nation. Don’t fuck it up.

Special Edition Revisited fan edit of A New Hope courtesy of Adywan. Video courtesy of Doorhenge.

A series of rooms? Must… fight… blog… theme… can’t… lose… control…

Agh! I have fallen under the spell of a blog theme! Darn your infernal machinations, Shanoah! DARN THEM TO HEEEEEECK!

Anyway, what springs to mind when you talk about a series of rooms is Dungeons and Dragons (but only if it’s an old-fashioned dungeon crawl of course. Problem is, we’ve already done the Dead Alewives’ Dungeons and Dragons (Satan’s game!).

Luckily, a new generation of gamer has risen to the challenge of making fun of rules lawyers, power gamers and people who don’t show up to games ’cause they have, like, lives and stuff. If the Dead Alewive’s Dungeons and Dragons is the cultural touchstone for geeks of the 1990s, then The Gamers (by the Dead Gentlemen, imagine that!) is the cultural touchstone for geeks of the new millennium. But this is LARP (Live Action RPG Parodying) (which would actually be LARPGP) (sorry, I like to use parentheses) (but you probably knew that already) (anyway, how about those Yankees?).

I’m actually having a little trouble deciding out how to present this. Maybe the best way to explain my conundrum is to make note of my last post, for What To Do in a Zombie Attack. See, I basically put a pay movie – one that you can buy on DVD – for free on the blog. However, Lone Bannana Productions, who made the movie, not only offered on YouTube but even put it up for free download on archive.org.

Not so with The Gamers. It’s not up for legit free download anywhere that I know of, and I don’t how AleBliska, who put it up on YouTube, is connected with the movie, if at all.

I know it’s kind of silly and inconsistent. But it’s these little things that I obsess about nowadays.

So I’m going to split the difference and just post the first two of five parts on this blog. These have some of the best gags, anyway: the pants pickpocketing, the ballista backstabbing and the paralyzing fear of water. Some of these things have happened to every gamer. And some of them… not so much.

Then stop by Paizo Publishing and drop a dime or two on the Director’s Cut of The Gamers. Or if you’re poor, like me, you can always hunt the other three parts down on YouTube.

Part 1

Part 2

Well, Shanoah, if we’re going to run stodgy Windows commercials, then we ought to show their polar opposite, right? And I think you know where I’m going with this…

Football fans who tuned in to the 1984 Super Bowl were treated to a little TV advertising history around the third quarter. The spot was directed by Ridley Scott (back when he was a good director) to introduce Apple’s new Macintosh computers, and it became forever known as the “1984″ commercial.

Courtesy of seancollier.

Ted Friedman of Duke University goes much more into the history and impact of this commercial than I’m willing to here. It’s worth a read. But I do want to reiterate one of his points in this blog:

… Ever since that commercial, the Mac has glowed with an aura of rebellion and empowerment. Without that commercial, those subsequent developments might not have been possible. The creative workers who embraced the Mac later in the 1980s may have never taken the plunge, without the buzz the commercial created. Without such a blockbuster introduction, in fact, the Mac might have sank before it ever had a chance to prove itself – as happened to its immediate Apple predecessor, the Lisa.

Well, the Macintosh hasn’t sunk, but it hasn’t exactly thrived, either. I mean, it has, what, two percent of the PC market? It just goes to show that advertising prowess doesn’t always translate into sold product. The converse, unfortunately, can also be said of Microsoft.

Well, this may seem a bit irreverent after the Traveling People of Ireland and the UK,  but… here’s some 8-but goodness by Savlonic titled, appropriately enough, Electro Gyspsy.

Courtesy of mrweebl.

Well, you know, Sean, I thought everyone knew that Tom Baker rocked. I wish I could show you a youtube video for this, but embedding was turned off.

You see, I found a website named Tom Baker Says. You may or may not know that on BT for quite a while, if you left a text message, you could hear Tom Bakers voice read it back to you.

Which is incredibly cool enough that this website formed entirely of recorded text messages. There is even a Karaoke section, where you can hear Tom Baker “singing”.

I recommend checking the version of the Kinks “You really Got Me”.

Another site I’ve found in passing that I keep forgetting to post here is “Garfield Minus Garfield“. This suprisingly entertaining webcomic asks what the comic “Garfield” would be like without the character Garfield.

And it turns into an existential comic about a sad and lonely guy who spends all his time talking to himself. It works quite well.

What, you want a video for the day? Well, all right, fine. If my collection of links weren’t entertaining enough, here:

Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Made (SCTV)

If you recall my SCTV post a while back, this is a video that escaped from it, which is odd, because this video is where I started from when I did the search that found the videos I did post…