One of my piped-est of pipe dreams is to make a series of trailers for cool films that will never exist.
Because of these dreams, I have been researching (poorly) how to do quick and easy and cheap frame-by-frame animation for short videos. Here I strung together multiple frames in Microsoft Photo into a primitive video and slapped some really nice free-to-use music from Pixabay onto it.
Anybody have any suggestions for additional super-easy-to-use-for-lazy-Luddites cheap or free software I should use?
Enjoy the ad below.
I made it for The Lost Lush: RELOADED urban picaresque pub crawl adventure I have been trying to get people to review and rate (without success as of Spring 2021) for some time now.
So recently, this Luddite has finally been using his cell phone. I've
been getting into an app for Android which is an adaptation of the
classic boardgame, Risk. My wife and I play each other while propped up
on pillows side-by-side, waiting for our kid next door to stop
screeching and drop off to sleep.
No, RISK, not Stratego: Fascinating two-handed strategy game. Also: Where is his other hand?
My wife bought this fantasy map pack for the app, and there is this cool dungeon map titled LOST TEMPLE. DYSON LOGOS is right there in the byline!
I asked Dyson Logos about it and he said: "Yeah, I should promote that a bit."
The map plays well in a non-D&D-type game. I beat my wife (in RISK!) three times. It's interesting to think about whether the Jacquaying and loops of RPG map theory have any effect on different games with entirely different rules and goals.
So if you'd like to play a dungeon faction trying to take over the areas of a Dyson Logos map, have an Android cell phone, and would like playing electronic Risk, lash out and snarf this up!
You can get it at the Google Play store. RISK: Global Domination by SMG Studio, licensed from Hasbro. And then you dig around in the fantasy map packs for Lost Temple.
Or you can wriggle through SMG Studios' website and go to the SteamPowered store (looking at SMG Studios, I see it stands for "Sydney and Melbourne" -- It's great that an Australian development company worked on a game in which taking over Australia first is often a winning strategy)
I really hope more people will buy, enjoy, and review my Prague pub-crawl THE LOST LUSH: RELOADED.
I have two listings of identical content, because of the way I launched this revamp of the original, much smaller version, and wanted to get free updates to everyone who bought the oldest version. Weirdly, DTRPG discounted one of the identical versions of THE LOST LUSH to $2.99, and the other was discounted to just $3.99. So if you want to try the pub-crawling adventure for a dollar cheaper, make sure to click on the link above, or search for the CSL004 version from the Coiled Sheets of Lead page at DTRPG.
There are, of course, thousands of other great creations from other creators discounted at DriveThruRPG.com -- so it's worth checking out everything you saw on Tenfootpole.org or heard about on Fear of a Black Dragon podcast but were leery of spending so much on.
As mentioned in the title to this post, sale ends 11:59pm, November 30, 2020 (Pacific Standard Time?)
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In other news, I've been hanging out a lot with my family and am grateful for our health and being able to hang out together.
Still working on the Czech fairy tales adventure to play with my kid, as described here.
I've been invited to play D&D online via Roll20 by my buddy's co-worker. I met the guy once before, in person, in 2019 when we were helping my friend schlep furniture to his new house. He seems like a good egg.
I'm impressed he is taking on running D&D online. That goes against all of my Luddite tendencies, but it's good for me to venture out of my comfort zone, even if it's just as a player, instead of as DM.
Also outside my comfort zone: simply being a player rather than DM. It's good to relinquish control, and step back from my aesthetic control freak tendencies. I usually only like immersing players in a homebrew low-fantasy multi-sensory Gesamtkunstwerk at my own house. So it will be good for me to appreciate somebody else's vision.
He's also running 5e and doing a fantasy/sci-fi mashup, which are also challenging elements for me. But this will be good for fighting my own edition snobbery, close-mindedness, and reluctance to get chocolate in my peanut butter.
Here in this lifeboat together, this fallout shelter against the invisible threat, I have been wishing my 9-year-old ADHD-challenged kid would get into D&D or D&D-adjacent things to talk about with Dad.
She is incredibly smart, especially with language, and very creative, but has trouble focusing, and has been diagnosed with a bit of oppositional-defiant disorder. I can't push my interests on her, even if I was crazy about them at her age.
She has rejected, when I tried to show them to her, the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder, the 1977 Rankin-Bass Hobbit with Arthur Rackham-inspired art, and the 1973 Harryhausen movie, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, in which Dr. Who's Tom Baker plays the villain. She lost interest even in the faster-paced, more modern 2001 Fellowship of the Ring movie, refusing to watch more after the Shortcut to Mushrooms part.
As mentioned previously, in 2019, I bought the DUNGEON! boardgame as something we could play together, but the lure of video games and screens in general drew her attention elsewhere.
She has also said she has no interest in seeing any of the Star Wars movies or spinoff cartoons. My wife made her watch The Mandalorian and, besides Baby Yoda drinking soup, my kidlet found nothing to like in it.
So I was surprised and pleased when kidlet comes out of nowhere with:
"Dad, can we play that game that you write stuff for?"
My wife, kid, and I all live under the same roof with my 80-year-old mother (who has her own basement granny flat) so quarantining isn't as difficult as it could have been. My mother and my wife have both played D&D before (my mom played clerics; my wife, thieves and paladins). This is going to be our in-person D&D group.
One bright spot of commonality already here between me and my kidlet is our enthusiasm for Czech culture.
Her favorite books for me to read to her: Prag Voller Gespenster ("Prague Full of Ghosts") and Czech Folktales by K.J. Erben and B. Němcová, illustrated by previously mentioned humble genius Josef Lada.
So I'm writing an adventure including characters, magic items, and monsters from these Czech stories.
I'll run it for one or two sessions with the family, do revisions, then publish the thing at the Coiled Sheets of Lead shop on DriveThruRPG.com.
Above is my map for The Fields We Know and the Wilderland.
You know that old curse, "May you live in interesting times?"
2020 has been waaaaaay too interesting. I wanted to hold off and not bore readers, or frustrate readers who are thinking too much about all this and need some distraction, but I can't hold it back.
After 9/11/2001, the satirical genius newspaper, the Onion, was shocked into silence for a while, but then printed a much-needed, well-thought-out issue with headlines like "A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Shit Again" illustrated with Brittney Spears in a bikini with a snake coiled around her. I'm not there yet, but if you persevere to the end of this post, I promise some attempt at humor and vaguely game-able material, OK?
The picture is from in front of my house in Minneapolis at the beginning of June. A unfamiliar woman drove up in an SUV the morning after, took pictures, and said, "Can you believe they are doing this?"
I told her, "People are angry." I thought the angry graffittists were remarkably restrained. They didn't use my exterior walls as a billboard, they didn't use the nearby houses' fences as a billboard, and they didn't even trample the wussy little flowers I am trying to replace the grass in front lawn with.
Either another SUV or the same one took pictures of the neighbors' house and their Black Lives Matter sign. Yet another damn black SUV was reported a block away, with two young white chicks covered from head-to-toe in black: hoodies, tactical jackets, fancy gas-masks, doing a photo-shoot. WTF? Their license plates were missing. They took off when homeowners came out and asked what they were doing.
There seemed to be 4 1/2 groups of people out on the streets at night: peaceful, but understandably angry protestors, a few of whom might have erupting into attacking buildings; opportunists who wanted to loot stuff; people who like to burn and destroy things in general; middle-class white anarchists for whom this was "the spark that would ignite the Revolution"; and scary-ass white "Boojihadis" and neo-Nazis of various types, decked out in really expensive-looking tactical gear, bulletproof black jackets, clean boots, near-military-grade gas masks (and, at maybe in one case, umbrellas - see this article at Forbes.com).
The drugstore two blocks away from me was hit that night. I walked over the next morning to get blood pressure pills somebody in my household needed. I asked the cashier about the boarded-up glass door and heard how schmucks entered that way, couldn't get the nicer, more locked-down drugs, and left with lower-value items. A jewelry store down the way was hit. In later days, two cosmetics shops and a coffee shop were hit.
Along with the Cub Foods grocery store and the Target in the neighborhood where I used to own a house until 2013, MIGIZI non-profit organization for Native American youth and Gandhi Mahal Indian restaurant were destroyed. The public library was attacked. A construction site for affordable housing was burnt down. The post office was destroyed.
The "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo" types and the neo-Nazis who fantasize in their (Wisconsin? Idaho? Colorado? Texas? Illinois?) exurban bunkers about igniting a Turner-Diaries-style race war were extremely scary. People reported finding caches of gasoline-soaked flammable materials hidden in their yards and alleys. It was said that these schmucks would use "urban guerrilla" tactics to scatter when their initial targets near East Lake Street got too hot, literally and metaphorically, and they were supposed to run into the neighborhoods in all directions and attack "targets of opportunity".
A friend who lives in a different neighborhood, but the same ZIP code as the post office which was burnt down, said it looked like opportunists had attacked the liquor stores and pharmacies near her, but that the neighborhood hardware store, with its store cat, had also been attacked. Luckily, the poor cat was later found alive and severely shaken, but unharmed.
My friend said she thinks the people who want to incite "Civil War 2" or the race war are targeting nodes of civil society, not only the places which hold us together as neighbors and communities, but the intangibles: the spiritual glue and trust by which we hold together.
In good and more recent news, the DriveThruRPG charity bundle I donated my STATUES adventure to raised $16,763.22 to NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
1678
x $9.99 = $16763.22
The bundle stopped being available on 6-22-2020, but you can still check out and donate to the organization at NAACP LDF.
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OK, I want to talk about lighter topics right now.
Click on the picture to hear this song I like: Afraid by Exchpoptrue. Even though, of course, there have been plenty of real things to be afraid of recently, this song pokes deadpan Teutonic (or Gallic?) fun at fear itself.
My wife and I were talking about how the psychological terms she uses in her work would make awesome band names:
DECAY THEORY - Minimalist post-punk band
MOTIVATED FORGETTING - Title of Decay Theory's 1st album
COGNITIVE DISTORTION - Legendary hardcore/thrash band
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE - The highfalutin' No Wave intellectual noise outfit from NYC
DISPLACEMENT -Post-metal band
SCHIZOID FANTASY - Pioneering stoner doom band. Played influential California desert shows in 1990. Beloved 1970s-style double gatefold album highly sought after by collectors.
BORDERLINE - Pop dance r&b group. Height of popularity in 1991.
REACTION FORMATION - All-woman r&b group. Slick synchronized dance routines wearing high-cut one-piece swimsuits and high heels.
PERSONALITY DISORDERS - Cute glasses- and sweater-wearing Oregonian indie rockers. Give self-deprecating, very funny interviews. Also the name of a completely unrelated 1970s early punk rock band in New York City.
If you had the persistence to read to the end of this post, but are still annoyed there was no gamable content, choose among the terms of art above and make new psionic disciplines or spells out of any that appeal to you.
(I wonder if, since I mentioned the words that summon them, MADAME LOLA or KING MARK's spells or vampire spam will appear in the comments now. Even the Pakistani wigs and women's night dress spammer has abandoned me recently)
Minneapolis has seen some truly terrible things in recent days, although right now it's quieter.
If you want to ask me for a local point of view, feel free to send me an email.
OneBookShelf sent me an invitation to participate in fundraiser bundles for Black Lives Matter and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
I wanted to do something to work toward justice beyond slacktivism and calling politicians and signing online petitions. Demonstrating on the streets is not what I wanted to do, at my age, and in my situation. I can't really donate big amounts of money in my current (unemployed) financial situation, either.
So even if this is the only way I'm helping now, I'm glad I have the opportunity. I feel a little less of a putz.
I offered my STATUES adventure on DriveThruRPG - It seems to be the main adventure of mine that people are interested in.
As of June 10, 2020, 1:00pm, 75 people so far have shown up in my DriveThruRPG sales figures as having bought the NAACP Legal Defense Fund #1 Bundle. STATUES appears within.
People get more than 40 RPG products for $9.99.
As DTRPG says at the bottom of the bundle:
Total value:
$489.78
Special bundle price:
$9.99
Savings of:
$479.79 (98%)
I feel like the tiny opening band at a giant fundraiser lineup among such luminary headliners as GARDENS OF YNN.
I'm honored to be part of this.
According to my calculator app - $749.25 has been raised so far for NAACP.
I know the worthy cause is the overwhelming appeal driving purchases (as well it should be!) as well as the draw of creators of Emmy Allen caliber who made the other stuff in the bundle (as should be expected), but it feels really good to be a small part of this greater whole.
Now I'm going to schlepp off to the granny flat portion of my house and prepare late lunches for my hyperkinetic kid and her convalescent grandmother.
