Big O

This is just one of those anime series that hits all the right notes, IMO. The premise (from Wikipedia):

The story takes place forty years after a mysterious occurrence causes the residents of Paradigm City to lose their memories. The series follows Roger Smith, Paradigm City’s top Negotiator. He provides this much needed service with the help of an android named R. Dorothy Wayneright and his butler Norman Burg. When the need arises, Roger calls upon Big O, a giant relic from the city’s history that may hold the key to its future.

The television series is designed as a tribute to Japanese and Western shows from the 1960s and 1970s. The series is done in the style of film noir and combines the feel of a detective show with the mecha genre of anime. The setpieces are reminiscent of Toho monster movies and the score is an eclectic mix of styles and musical homages.

Roger Smith is totally a Bruce Wayne-esque figure, buzzing around town in his souped-up Caddilac and shipping Big O onto the scene by underground train when necessary. And the theme song sounds like it was written by Styx!

Here’s a sample episode, “The Electric City”:

More about the Batman/Bruce Wayne connection:

Before The Big O, Sunrise Studios was a subcontractor for Warner Bros. Animation’s Batman: The Animated Series, one of the series’ influences.

Roger Smith is a pastiche of the Bruce Wayne persona and the Dark Knight Batman. The character design resembles Wayne, complete with slicked-back hair and double-breasted business suit. Like Bruce, Roger prides himself in being a rich playboy to the extent that one of his household’s rules is only women may be let into his mansion without his permission. Like Batman, Roger Smith carries a no-gun policy, albeit more flexible. Unlike the personal motives of the Batman, Roger enforces this rule for “it’s all part of being a gentleman.” Among Roger’s gadgetry is the Griffon, a large, black hi-tech sedan comparable to the Batmobile, a grappling cable that shoots out his wristwatch and the giant robot Angel calls “Roger’s alter ego.”

The Big O’s cast of supporting characters includes Norman, Roger’s faithful mechanically-inclined butler who fills the role of Alfred Pennyworth; R. Dorothy Wayneright, who plays the role of the sidekick; and Dan Dastun, a good honest cop who, like Jim Gordon, is a friend to the hero.

Conan the Librarian

Wait for the chop…

Once you go Blackle you never go… um… backle, I guess

Blackle.com

“Black Google would save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year”

The whiteness of Google always hurt my eyes, so this is a nice alternative for a homepage. And yeah, less electricity burned and so on.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

My son has been on a major Batman kick for a while now, giving me ample reason to locate and download all sorts of Bat-related avi files and thereby feed my own ever-hungry inner nerd goblins. I was kind of leery about watching The Batman (note the The), which has been around for a few seasons now. I felt like I was betraying the animated series of the 90s — the one with the great voices and the Bruce Timm character designs — for a younger, flashier Bat show. Surprisingly, it’s not so bad. I mean there are some weak spots (the Joker), but overall the plotting is cogent, the dialogue snappy, and the action scenes more dynamic than those of its predecessors.

And now there’s an even newer Bat show called The Brave and the Bold. Instead of rehashing the brooding, Gotham-based grit of The Batman and Batman TAS, this show changes directions completely. It’s a full-on Silver Age-esque foray, where Bats finds himself teaming up with some A-list and B-list DC heroes to battle with space pirates, gorillas on pterodactyls, and even a few evil Santa-droids. And it all looks really good.

Breaking the Badness Yardstick (On Your Asses)

I may use this later to stun you all into submission, but right now you can just bask in its unholy glory. Perhaps someone will come along to wipe the drool from your chins.

Checking In

Just about to sit down and have some soup, and I started thinking it was about time that I updated the DF.

Incidentally, I think the acronym DF is probably a bad choice. When most gamers see those letters they immediately think of Dragonsfoot, an active site with forums and lots of downloads that is dedicated to AD&D’s 1st Edition.

…

Ballantine Books and Del Rey have been on something of a Sword & Sorcery kick for the last few years, republishing Wandering Star’s amazing Conan collections, which organize the stories according to when Robert E. Howard wrote them along with some lavish illustrations, and now doing the same thing for Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. Supposedly these texts are more authoritative than those found in the Eternal Champion series of hardbacks published by White Wolf in the mid-90s, which presented the tales of Elric in narrative order. The artwork and design are definitely top-notch in the Del Rey editions.

…

Fans of Original Edition D&D (OD&D) — or even folks just interested in the seminal version of the game — can now get a PDF version for free. Swords & Wizardry is another retro-clone in the tradition of OSRIC (a 1st Edition clone) and Labyrinth Lord (a Moldvay Basic D&D clone). I’m not sure if a retro-clone version of 2nd Edition AD&D will appear someday — there may be some conflict with Kenzer & Co, publishers of Hackmaster (a WotC-licensed variant on 2nd Edition, with some 1st Edition elements thrown in for good measure). There’s also Basic Fantasy — another Basic D&D clone with some modern tweaks. I would like to try Swords & Wizardry out, purely as a dungeon crawl experiment.

Dolmen Island, Part II

Take a look at Torstan’s finished map of Dolmen Island. Next I’ll be adding the labels.

Dolmen Island

So I may have to wait until I’m very old and very gray before I get an opportunity to run a game with the old crew, but this possibility hasn’t kept me from thinking about the campaign I want to run. I’ve become pretty enamored with the notion of a sandbox D&D campaign — that is, a game where the players explore a fully fleshed-out setting to their hearts’ content.

Enter: Dolmen Island.

A padawan Dungeon Master’s first instinct is to design a vast and sprawling campaign world on the scale of Middle-Earth (or bigger). This can be a lot of fun, but it’s incredibly time-consuming and more importantly it misses that Old School sweet-spot. The traditional way of things — the way Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson grew their campaigns — was to start small and work your way out. In this way you can manage to fold in a lot of detail over time, details that will come about organically because you’ll be paying attention to what catches your players’ interests. They don’t necessarily need to have an active role in the growth of the campaign setting (although that’s entirely possible), but by participating in the game they will have an undeniable influence over the direction it takes. This is the feng shui of the sandbox setting.

Rather than attempt to design the map myself (I lack the proper skills and patience to pull it off), I put out a request at the Cartographers’ Guild. Torstan quickly responded and he’s been doing a great job as you can see on this thread. When he’s finished (which won’t be long now), I’ll be adding the text/labels. The finished product will be a 300 dpi tif file that will print up nicely in an 11″ x 17″ format.

UPDATE: Click here to see some images of the island-in-progress.

Recently Read

For the past couple years I’ve been on an extended Jack Vance kick. For those of you unfamiliar with the man’s work, check out this site for some nice capsule overviews. It’s not complete but a good many of his better known novels and collections are listed there along with some nice (mostly British) cover art.

The Languages of Pao (1957) is not (as the title might suggest) a treatise on alien languages, but the story of a vast social experiment wherein the docile people of the planet Pao are altered through the medium of language to become specialists in the areas of war, science and industry. A couple revolutions take place, the cybernetic wizards of planet Breakness cut a nice deal and make off with an absurd number of Paonese women, and the brigands from Batmarsh finally get what’s coming to them. It’s a very fast read, and like most of Vance’s stuff it’s thought-provoking without any undo strain on the flow of the plot. 4/5

DF’s Top 10 Electronic Albums of 2008

Yes, it’s that time of year again. And rather than organize these albums into some sort of countdown list (like last year) I’m just going to pitch them to you in alphabetical order. This is all just a big exercise in subjectivity anyway right? Right. So to review, this was the list from 2007:

• µ-Ziq: Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique
• D’Arcangelo: Eksel
• Freescha: Freeschaland
• Gui Boratto: Chromophobia
• Keef Baker: Redeye
• Kim Hiorthøy: My Last Day
• Milieu: New Drugs For Nuclear Families of the Seventies
• Mosaik: Apologies
• Proem: A Permanent Solution
• Thisket: Trytry

At this point there are probably some releases that I would add that I hadn’t discovered when this list was made, but all in all these are some really fine-tuned albums that reflect the “high production values” side of electronic music that I find really enjoyable. You could try to dance around to this stuff, but ultimately these creatures are made for listening sessions at home or in the car.

Onto 2008.

ARTIST: Araya
ALBUM: The Bridge of Hesitation
LABEL: Benbecula

A touch of BOC-esque retro-flavor colors this break-fueled foray into melodic electronics. Excellent for long, pensive drives through rolling countryside vistas. With its sparse vocals and occasional string splashes, Bridge manages to bridge the gap between the urban and the urbane while firmly sticking to its IDM-tastic roots.

ARTIST: AZ-Rotator
ALBUM: Indefinable Sugar Cube
LABEL: Lovethechaos

While the DSP fookery elements of AZ-R’s sound persist here, Sugar Cube is pretty far off from the darker flavors found on Science of Chance (Ad Noiseam, 2005). In fact this stuff is downright playful in comparison — much closer to what you might call the Richard D. Jamesian brand of techno without being obviously derrivative. Melodically there’s almost an 80s synth feel at work, which definitely does it for me.

ARTIST: The Black Dog
ALBUM: Radio Scarecrow
LABEL: Soma Quality Recordings

This is probably the most impressive Black Dog album yet, which is saying a lot considering the absence of Ed Handley and Andy Turner (who went on to produce albums as Plaid). Ranging from pale, ghostly ambience to 4/4 ambient techno of the vintage variety, Radio Scarecrow is The Black Dog at its most refined. Sparse, subtle, and precise. Definitely a good listen for the night-time.

ARTIST: Burial
ALBUM: Untrue
LABEL: Hyperdub

Call it grime or dubstep or whatever, this is just a good listen. Certainly there’s an R’n'B vibe at work here, though it’s constantly undermined by the dirty, skittering percussion and dark waves of bass. The end product is something greater than its individual parts. Burial transforms his source material, alchemically lending it the gravitas of an old ghost story. Incidentally, another good night-album.

ARTIST: Deastro
ALBUM: Keepers
LABEL: Ghostly International

Dismissing this as just another indie/electronic crossover project would be an injustice. What Deastro manages to do here is make an album that functions equally well within both genres. His occasionally Ben Gibbard-esque vocal styles and hyper-detailed production don’t so much recall The Postal Service as exceed its merits in terms of song-writing and style. While there’s a certain pop charm here, Keepers‘ maximalist layer cake of electronic percussion will probably prevent it from getting much play in the indie pop market.

ARTIST: Kelpe
ALBUM: Ex-Aquarium
LABEL: D.C. Recordings

Downtempo, sea-obsessed collisions of electronic and acoustic sounds. There’s almost an experimental quality to it, but it all manages to work so well together. Fans of BOC will probably love it, though it doesn’t necessarily sound that similar.

ARTIST: Kettel
ALBUM: Myam James (Part 1)
LABEL: Sending Orbs

Word on the street is that this fellow has been suffering from some kind of mental breakdown. If anything, this crisis has only augmented his musical output. References to Aphex Twin and Plaid aside, this is simply well-crafted music.

ARTIST: M83
ALBUM: Saturdays = Youth
LABEL: Mute

While M83’s other stuff — gravitating somewhere in the indie/ambient zone — is great, I could deal with five more albums of 80s-inspired electro-pop songs like this one.

ARTIST: Somatic Responses
ALBUM: Digital Darkness
LABEL: Hymen Records

These Welsh dudes have been refining their sound from album to album in slow but steady increments. Often lumped in with the industrial crowd (they tend to be kind of noisy) or the hardcore techno set (they like beats), Somatic Responses is difficult to pigeon-hole. They’ve been doing their own thing for quite a while, and this approach has paid off in Digital Darkness. Sounding in many ways like a culmination of their previous efforts, at times blasting the listener with chunks of rhythm and heavy basslines, only to drift off into a troubled sleep moments later, the album manages to be listenable and harsh at the same time.

ARTIST: Xploding Plastix
ALBUM: Treated Timber Resists Rot
LABEL: Beatservice Records

At turns melodic and funky, this is probably the most accessible album I’ve listed here. It’s like electronic music for gypsies. Again, there’s a certain Richard D. Jamesian thing happening here, but the influence is sublimated by XP’s weird palette of acoustic and untraditional noises. Definitely a keeper.