Blog Archives

Roleplaying games grew out of a set of rules for miniatures wargames.  For a long stretch of time, it used to be that games would try to differentiate themselves on being the best “reality simulator” on the market. This eventually led to publishers developing plug in “subgames” like Snapshot for Traveller or Phoenix Command, billed […]

One of the first rules of user interface design is that good design is invisible. This also applies to game design. An excellent book on the subject of user interface design, and indirectly on game design, is Scott Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Krug’s primary thesis is that reducing options is the key to a clean design. Have […]

It may sound preposterous to suggest that one of the most storied brands in the comic book industry is on its way out, especially if that brand is responsible for such permanent icons as Batman and Superman, and has provided the source material for billions of dollars in entertainment revenue. But it is, and the […]

The AVID Assistant Kickstarter is live.  Finally.  After more than three weeks of laying the ground and telling people it will happen, and getting approvals taken care of by Kickstarter itself.  And a week of learning how to use a non-linear video editor for something that I was told should take about a day, tops. Video […]

Because of its intense esoteric undercurrent and the highly influential underlying prop of the madness-inducing titular play, it is easy to overlook the futuristic society and its doomed social order portrayed in Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. It shouldn’t be. The oddly woven anthology, a blend of Poe-like horror, Gothic romance, and near-future […]

I had planned to write a longer piece this week, but I learned more about video editing than I ever wanted to. Video editing is an arcane art. I’ve learned more about frame rates, color spaces, audio synching, and the fact that different editors and recording setups output to different codecs that the others can’t […]

Few will take issue with Dr. Wertham when he stresses the many disgusting aspects of comic books. The pictorial examples and quotations he presents are irrefutable evidence that the comics incite to crime and violence, that they make their appeal often through sex, perversion and sadism. That the aesthetic quality of the drawings and writing […]

In this series, we’ve looked at the goals, the challenges, and techniques of book-to-film adaptations.  Now, to avoid tediousness, the marquee showdown:  as a medium, are books inherently better than movies? Many of the arguments against films are akin to the gnostic condemnations of the incarnation, favoring the immaterial over the material flesh-and-blood image.  Thus, I will mostly argue in […]

“All my life I have been what is called a square. A very serious type of person. A slow thinker. I am one of those odd types who, lacking natural talent and having no natural intiuation – these are probably related phenomena – had to think my way through life.” — A.E. Van Vogt (from […]

When it comes to adaptation, filmmakers are literary cannibals—that is to say, they often cannibalize the source material with a kind of savage artistry—first, hacking off large chunks of back-story; then, skinning off most of the exposition; next, roasting and ingesting only the choicest cuts of scenes, and the best lines of dialogue; and then, […]