Alive!

March 4, 2008 · Posted in Photos, Reviews · Comment 

Photography

Here are some photos from the trip to Vogelgat. I don’t have a telescopic lens; all those close-ups of small animals are the result of a lot of determined sneaking.

Here’s a photo of new! improved! paper mache Cthulhu. I revamped him for orientation week, and boy, was I sick of paper mache by the end.

Moving Pictures

Farscape is awesome, and you should watch it. The first season, while kind of cool, is not really representative of what the series later becomes. It really comes into its own when the longer story arcs start. The first and second seasons have a couple of really awful filler episodes; I think the third and fourth seasons are the best. John Crichton becomes remarkably less annoying — I remember spending the whole of the first season wanting to stab him — although his epic wormhole subplot drags on a bit and ends up dominating the entire series. Had the series not been cancelled, it would perhaps have moved onto the Nebari after the conclusion of the Peacekeeper-Scarran war. This will probably never happen (apparently some short webisodes are due to be released this year, but they’re likely to be far-future sequels). It makes me sad in my pants.

The Peacekeeper Wars, the two-part miniseries made to wrap up the final season’s loose ends, is rather depressing to watch. It’s clear that a season’s worth of plot has been compressed into a much smaller space, and this is not a good thing. The plot is very rushed, some parts of it are not convincing because so little time is spent developing them, and some characters just walk on screen, wave and disappear (or hang around in the background with no dialogue). I believe that there was a two year gap before PKW was filmed, and this also shows — some of the acting is a bit off. It’s worth watching for completeness, and there are little moments of coolness — but don’t expect much, and be aware that it might drive you to drink if you recently watched season four and loved it.

Something entirely different, which is also awesome and should be watched by you, is Samurai Fiction, Nakano Hiroyuki’s samurai comedy.

Interactive Entertainments

If you’re a member of CLAWs, and you wrote a module or LARP that one time (or multiple times), please contribute to the latest attempt at an online catalogue/library, which I describe here. I have added By The Rivers Dark, my and Hodgestar’s most recent Dragonfire module, which you are welcome to download and play. I hope to add our two LARPs and several older modules soon (or later, in the case of modules which have to be extracted from the jaws of an obscure proprietary file format).

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