Category: Nerdiness

Last night I saw Howl’s Moving Castle and it was enchanting. I look forward to seeing the subtitled version as soon as possible. Miyazaki seems to bring something fascinating and familiar over from his previous movies and adds something new with each film. I would say that if you liked Laputa: Castle in the Sky and/or Spirited Away you will enjoy Howl’s Moving Castle.

I met up with Kirsten and Geoff at Tinseltown to see the movie and I got my first birthday present of 2005: a taro milkshake bubble tea. The perfect drink/desert. After the movie we just sort of wandered around downtown, and it reminded me of how infrequently I’m down there (and to a lesser extent, why).

Today was released a D&D e-book that I did artwork for, called Hungry Little Monsters. For $7 US, the D&D nerds can get a book full of well-designed 3.5 edition monsters written and at the same time, contribute to charity

http://www.seankreynolds.com/store/hlm/

Hungry Little Monsters
A Charity Book Benefitting FoodForAll.org
by representatives of the d20 industry

Hungry Little Monsters is a compilation project initiated by Sean K Reynolds to be a charity fundraiser for FoodForAll.org, a program to help feed the hungry.
Hungry Little Monsters features 43 new monsters (each approximately one page long) for the d20 system. The theme for this book is “monsters for which you can use existing miniatures or tokens.” Rather than a collection of bizarre-anatomy creatures that you can’t represent with anything on your miniatures shelf or in a store, this book is full of creatures which you can represent in play with commonly-available miniatures or tokens. This is set up by a serious of monster archetypes — corpses (skeletal or zombielike undead), fiends (your typical bat-winged demonic or devilish creature), humanoids, oozes, spirits (bodiless undead), and so on.
This book is authored by volunteer members of the RPG industry, including Sean K Reynolds, Dave Mattingly, Matt Forbeck, Scott Bennie, and Ed Greenwood, as well as a dozen other established game designers. Likewise, the editing, art, and typesetting is donated as well. Hungry Little Monsters is created entirely on volunteer time. The game material in the book is entirely open game content as defined by the Open Gaming License.
All proceeds from this book are donated to Food For All.org
A special thanks to typesetter Jeffrey Visgaitis who spent more time working on Hungry Little Monsters than any other contributor. Jeffrey, you went the distance for this project, and if it weren’t for you it never would have been finished.
About the Cover Artist: Brooklyn-based illustrator Gerald Lee went through college thinking his soon-to-be mentor Tony DiTerlizzi was in fact a girl. Fortunately, Tony was amused by this mistake and agreed to take Gerald as an apprentice. Gerald has a certain knack for meeting great artists throughout the industry and applying what he learns from them (through trial and error and a lot of imagination) to his own art. Expect to see a lot more from his drawing board.

63-page PDF (plus 22-page illustration book and 4-page token book), product number SKR003
Price: $7, available from

* DriveThruRPG — watermarked PDF (unlimited print/copy/paste)
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=50&products_id=2437

There were tons of garage/yard sales today, and I stopped by probably 10 on my way home from Marlo’s this morning. There was one cluster of them on 14th and Ontario, and one of the tables was run by Mrs Glick from the Simpsons. “No, Ned. JUST candy! Ninety dollars!” I didn’t buy anything from any of the 5 or 6 tables there just because of her. Although they did have a bag of army men with some plastic trees that would have been useful for D&D, but the bag wasn’t priced and the guy in charge of the sale was 20 feet away and talking to someone else, so he screwed himself out of a sale! Not that I would have paid more than 75 cents for the bag. So he screwed himself out of three quarters!

At another one, much closer to my house, I found a board game which I’m giving to Sherane, and a video tape with 3 episodes of PeeWee’s Playhouse. The tape was encase in…yes…one of those black plastic cases that I have on my wish list! Double trouble for just a buck.

This morning I had breakfast at Reno’s for the first time ever. The food was cheap and edible. Marlo was sexy even when she was spilling orange juice (or because?). And Marlo and I played Knights of the Old Republic before we left and a wookiee joined our group, and we killed a rancor. That was fun. The combat in the game is really awkward. I don’t care for it.

My birthday is on the 28th. I figure I’ll have another birthday auction some time, I don’t know when. Probably not this month because gosh, there’s just too much excitement in June already.

In celebration of my upcoming celebration, here’s the ongoing Tortor Wish List.

CDs:
Lord of the Rings soundtrack (any)
Muppet Show 25th Anniversary

DVDs/VHS:
Challenge of the Superfriends complete first season or second season
Complete Superman Cartoons: Diamond Anniversary Edition
Jonny Quest Season 1 (low priority)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (low priority)
Princess Mononoke (low priority)
My Neighbor Totoro

Books (not to be purchased at Chapters please!):
Tales of Freeport
Professor Wormbog and the Search for the Zipperump-a-zoo (low priority)
Dungeon magazine subscription

Misc:
Practically any miniatures that look cool – especially of monsters that I don’t already have and “rare” minis like female gnome monks, that sort of thing.
D&D Miniatures:
DEATHKNELL SET
Beholder http://search.ebay.com/deathknell-beholder_W0QQfromZR40QQsojsZ1
ABERRATIONS SET
Achaierai
Hook Horror
Chuul
Gibbering Mouther!!!!!!
ARCHFIENDS SET
Ochre Jelly
Gauth!!!
DRAGONEYE SET
Salamander
Carrion Crawler
HARBINGER SET
Displacer Beast

Those black plastic VHS tape cases
Nyarlathotep and/or shoggoth plush doll
Sripey socks (not sports socks)

You know what rhymes with Torlo? TORGO! Also I wanted to point out torgo web site. Check out the t-shirt! www.torgo.org

SW Trivia time: what is the name of the staff-like things that the tusken raiders use?

Tenacious D has begun recording music for their upcoming film, Pick of Destiny. Here are some other interesting tidbits of news: It was uncertain whether Boston could host a convention for minority journalists in 2008 because the city has a law requiring that all Native Americans who enter the city be arrested. The US Senate approved $82 billion in emergency funding for the war (just think what I could do if they gave that money to me instead). Children in the western world were hitting puberty earlier, often at age seven; researchers suggested that this was due to indifferent fathers, childhood obesity, exposure to pesticides, or watching too much television. In Brazil, a man and his parents were murdered when the man lost a real-life role-playing murder game. Australian researchers were working to clone the extinct Tasmanian tiger (finally a worthy use for cloning! Hooray! First Tasmanian tigers, next woolly mammoths!). Wal-Mart apologized for running an advertisement that equated current Arizona zoning ordinances with the Nazi regime. Researchers at Cornell University developed a robot that can build copies of itself from spare parts (Janet are you listening?) and in Utah, a high school teacher brought his class to see the dissection of a live dog. “I thought,” he said, “that it would be just really a good experience.”

I want to watch Raiders this afternoon, for obvious reasons.
“Perhaps you could warn them, if only you spoke Hovitos.”

In a shocking turn of events, this week has been laden with roleplaying. Last Thursday, because of Cloud City and drawing deadlines, I postponed the Terak D&D campaign to Sunday afternoon. So that was 2 days ago. Tonight we played the Venger D&D campaign and we’re back to our regular Thursdays this week so that’s another game in 2 days. Then on Saturday Marlo & I are playing in David’s Star Trek game at the Drexoll Game Day. Four out of seven days gaming. That’s a lot, even for me.

I hadn’t been to work in 2 weeks because of art (thank gord) but this week it was back to the shelves for me. Yesterday I was in pretty good spirits but today was really slow. Luckily I had Chris’ walkman and Chris’ headphones to get me through it, plus the anticipation of D&D!

Tonight’s game was fun but there was a lot of off-topic conversation and general distraction all around. I don’t know what it was – if it was the adventure or if people were just antsy and bored because it was one of those days – but it was frustrating to try to keep the game on track. Hopefully it will be better on Thursday.

In the news: The Department of Homeland Security announced that it had wasted a great deal of money and needed much more. Also: the Mesa, Arizona, police department applied for funding to buy and train a tiny monkey that they can dress in a kevlar vest and send into dangerous situations.

I ran two Spaceship Zero adventures at the convention last weekend, and I played in a Star Wars game.

On the Friday night was the Drexoll 24 hour game-a-thon, and I played some Fearsome Floors, and a pretty cool game called…Laval or something. I forget. I played it with Sheri and Stephane and another mystery guy. It was kind of a typical German strategy game. I came in second.

The SSZ games were interesting. First I ran “Bring Me the Head of Dr Quisling” which I will tell you about now, unless you’re a SSZ player who hasn’t played the adventure yet – stop reading. But you’re probably not, so I’ll tell you that it involves Hitler’s brain inside a robot body, living in a ruined castle and creating a new nazi army and subjugating hydronauts. The other scenario is called “Web of the Space Bee” and it’s about a group of space pirates in the asteroid field who have contracted a degenerative disease that ruins their body and makes them paranoid. A winning combination! The session of the latter adventure went really well! The group managed to succeed at their mission (no mean feat) without any combat whatsoever (truly miraculous in SSZ). I ran a playtest at home with Marlo and Mike Jackson and Nathan and Taylor and it was kind of a disaster, so it was good to see that it wasn’t entirely my fault.

From the “Oh that hilarious leader of the world’s most powerful nation!” department: President George W. Bush announced the capture of a “major facilitator and chief planner for the Al Qaeda network.” The captured man turned out to be a mid-level Al Qaeda operative named Abu Faraj al-Libbi. “He used to make the coffee and do the photocopying,” said a former associate.

After Marlo and I saw Revenge of the Sith for the second time we realized that R2 and 3PO were responsible for Padme’s death. We wondered, how did the droids move a human body? 3PO is pretty useless and can’t really bend over, and R2D2 can only push a body in front of him, rolling the body over and over, or shoot that grappler thing out the back (which plunges into her rib cage) and then drag the body along. So they probably did that last thing, and her head kept bumping into the walls of the ship. Then R2 reprogrammed the medical droid to say “she simply lost the will to live.”

Recently, while drawing, I’ve been watching Tony Robinson (Baldric from Black Adder) talk about – and do – the worst jobs in history on the History Channel. Not only was it interesting to learn what the oldy timey people did to get by, but I learned the origins of a whole bunch of idioms, like “show you the ropes” and…okay I forget all the other ones. But it’s okay because I taped the entire 6 hour series. The best stuff was in the dark ages.

Down with the pope: Did you know that in 2001, Pope Benedict Whatever ordered Catholic bishops to hide allegations against pedophile priests from the public? Let’s hear it for the church.

Also, A papyrologist at Oxford University announced that new techniques in spectral imaging, which make it possible to decipher previously illegible ink on papyrus fragments, have yielded parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, a novel by Lucian, and an epic poem by Archilochos; researchers also applied the technique to third- and fourth-century manuscripts of the Revelation of Saint John and discovered that the number of the beast, contrary to popular belief, is 616, the area code of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I watched A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi over the past couple of days (while I’ve been drawing, of course) and after having watched Revenge of the Sith, the end of Jedi has a little bit more of a punch.

Also it made me want to watch all my episodes of Samurai Jack.

Tomorrow is the free Drexoll 24-hour game-a-thon at the Marpole Curling Club. What possible reason could you have not to go?

Last night Taylor, Mike Jackson, Nathan, Marlo and I played Spaceship Zero (Web of the Space Bee). It was my playtest for the Cloud City gaming convention this coming weekend. Some of the bits went pretty much exactly as planned, but as always, lack of proper pacing is my downfall. We probably would have gone for another 2 hours (after the prescribed 4 hour block) to finish the scenario properly at the rate we were going, so I’m going to have to make sure I don’t dawdle on periphery when I run it next time. Marlo said that this adventure and the last one (Bring Me the Head of Dr Quisling) were her two favourites so far, so that’s good, and it looks like I’ve made a SSZ convert out of Mike.