I hate computers

technology /tÉ›kˈnÉ’lÉ™dÊ’i/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronuncia[tek-nol-uh-jee]
noun
1. magic.
2. basically anything really cool that you don’t know how it works…and if it breaks, you have to buy a new one.

…or so says Strong Bad. Pretty good definition, if you ask me.

Both of my hard drives, a combined 300GB or so worth of data, kicked the bucket this past weekend, mere hours apart. I had the foresight to back most of the data up about a month ago, and most of the recent stuff (mostly D&D documents), I can recreate. And hey, a fresh install of Windows never hurts. At the very least, it’s a welcome excuse to purge my PC of all the random dumb applications I’ve loaded up since my last clean install.

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The future of fantasy roleplaying

I’ve played various incarnations of the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper roleplaying game since I was 14, and I’ve never been entirely happy with any of them. The old AD&D 2nd Edition rules that I started with were clunky and haphazard, often requiring some pretty annoying charts, and some fancy number-juggling on the players’ parts. Sometimes rolling high was better, and sometimes rolling low was better. That -5 to my armor class…yeah, that negative number was actually a good thing. And I don’t know why exactly I needed to roll a saving throw vs. rods, staves, and wands to avoid getting wuss-slapped by some damn monster, but that’s what the rules said…so that’s what I did. I certainly have some great nostalgic memories of playing and running AD&D 2E games aplenty back in high school (which I plan to one day relate on this blog), but in retrospect, the game’s mechanics made very little logical sense.

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Justice League revealed

Rob Liefeld, a.k.a. The World’s Worst Comic Book Artist, posted the cover of Brad Meltzer and Ed Benes’ upcoming Justice League of America #1 (due out this week) on his forum last night. Before I go any further, I’d just like to say how happy I am that Liefeld doesn’t actually have anything to do with this book…otherwise we’d be looking at something like this.

Anyhow, the team lineup (click the first pic above for a larger view) features a number of interesting choices. Aside from the obvious Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, we get former JLA’ers Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Black Canary, Red Tornado, Vixen, and Hawkgirl; and first-time Leaguers Arsenal (looking suspiciously like Red Arrow from Mark Waid’s beloved Kingdom Come miniseries) and Black Lightning.

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Snakes on my mother****ing blog

Friday, August 18, 2006: Snakes on a Plane hits theaters.

Sunday, August 20, 2006: This blog goes live.

I’m fairly certain these two events are not explicitly related. Then again, this movie has inspired stranger behavior.

Snakes on a Plane, the most ridiculously overhyped so-bad-it’s-good-but-not-really film ever, has raked in its opening weekend grosses, which according to Box Office Mojo, amount to somewhere in the $15,000,000 range. Yeah, way to back that horse, internet.

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