I’m overdue to post something here, so here’s the amazing-looking trailer for the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, due for release on 11/11/11:
As a reminder of how epic the previous game was, here are my screenshots from Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
I had a long post going last night, but it was too late to finish it … and I just don’t feel like it tonight, so here’s something different: Somebody on Flickr had pictures of dozens of board games he had gotten at resale stores over the years, and one of the games was The Dark Tower.
I thought I had blogged about it at one point in the past five years, since I know I found a flash version of the game online, but I guess I didn’t.
The reason I tried to find it was because a couple of commenters had never heard of the game, and some others of us were trying to explain it.
It was really, really cool: There was a big plastic tower in the middle of the board with a computerized number readout (pretty Jetsons for 1982!), and illustration slides that spun around to show your loot, your inventory, and your attackers. Bonus points: Orson Welles did the TV commercials! (It was a year or so before his death.)
Anyway, I found an even sweeter flash version, so click here to play it!
And speaking of Orson Welles, here’s a bizarre comedy sketch that features The Great Director, Dean Martin, and Jimmy Stewart:
Here are a bunch of mostly unrelated things, many of them I’ve been saving up for a while, waiting for a chance to post unrelated things …
So here we go:
I didn’t post this with my last post because the video part isn’t much — it’s just the end credits of the video game Portal — but what’s important is the excellent song, “Still Alive”, sung by Ellen McLain (a voice actor in Portal, as well as the other two “Orange Box” games) and written by Jonathan Coulton, who also wrote the song that became the theme for the G4TV animated series, Code Monkeys.
Anyway: “Still Alive” is excellent, so run the video and listen to it:
Speaking of good music, we’ve been watching The Next Great American Band on Fox (mainly because there’s not much else TV on on Friday nights), and except for the mediocre “artists” they make the bands cover (especially Billy Joel and Rod Stewart), it’s pretty good. We’re especially impressed by Light of Doom, a hard-rocking group of kids with a great work ethic and a healthy respect for the classic rock acts.
Hey Spook, Here’s the business we should have gotten into: Selling tumbleweeds for $25 a pop. This woman was learning HTML a few years ago, and had to pick a subject to build a test site around, so she constructed a fake tumbleweed-selling site, offering the rolling shrubs at $25 each.
That is, it was fake, until people (Yankees?) with more money that sense started sending in orders …
Now she’s making a good living at it.
Maybe you can figure out how to sell sandstorms.
Remember, target Yankees.
One interesting by-product of the writer’s strike is the fact that the Tonight Show is showing reruns from Leno’s first year on the job. It’s interesting seeing Jay with dark hair and wide lapels, trying to make Johnny Carson’s old formula work.
His current strategy fits him much better, standing closer to the audience, and interspersing the monologue with skits and props.
Carson’s routine wouldn’t work for everybody — in fact, there were a lot of times it didn’t work for him.
What are the odds that Evel Knievel would die of something as mundane as diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis? He spent almost half his life doing crazy dangerous stunts, but death couldn’t claim him during that time.
Just goes to show you: You never can tell …
Do you have too much time on your hands? This person does: Cowscapes.
Yeah, yeah, I need to post. Excuuuuuse me, I’ve been job-hunting.
Details later, but for now … I mentioned Oblivion (on Saturday, keep up), so here’s a hilarious (for the first 2 minutes, you can blow it off after that) “modded” sequence. Check out the innkeeper about 54 seconds in, and the monks at 1:30:
Everybody dance now!
It’s Todn8r‘s birthday today, and if he had bothered to give me his current email address, I would have already sent my birthday greetings personally, but since he didn’t, I feel forced to post this very flattering photo of him wearing the jersey of his favorite sports team in the world.
Isn’t that right, Todn8r? You like the ‘Skins, dontcha?
Anyway, happy birthday, old man! (I gave you your present earlier in the year, when I talked you into playing Oblivion. You’re welcome.)
Okay, more random things, plus things I’ve been meaning to get around to:
There’s a card game coming to the market soon for PS3 that’s like a 3D version of Magic the Gathering. It’s played with cards, but a webcam is pointed at the playing board and each card is represented on the screen in glorious animated 3D. I can’t remember if I mentioned this when I first saw it on G4TV a couple of months ago, but now there’s some great YouTube videos that actually do justic to the concept:
Wow. The whole concept is mind-blowing.
And now there’s one reason to own a PS3.
I keep forgetting to mention that I got to see Dr. Mary, World’s Greatest Dentist, last week. That’s always a joy — and no, I’m not being my usual sarcastic self. She and her husband have been friends with my wife and her family for a long time, plus she and I have so much in common, and she has such a wonderful personality. I took out my camera to take her picture (since, surprisingly, we still didn’t have any pictures of her after all these years), she didn’t shrink back and play shy like everybody else does; she bared her teeth and got really close to the camera.
It turns out that she got some new Invisalign braces and wanted to show them off for the camera.
It’s a professional thing, I guess, like the time I showed off pictures of my computer’s shiny new power supply.
Anyway, here’s the picture of the dentist I’m always raving about, in case you were curious.
Remember The Verve from about ten years ago, from their catchy little hit “Bittersweet Symphony”? They broke up, but recently they recorded a fourteen-minute jam session — dubbed “The Thaw Sessions” — and now NME (New Musical Express, the legendary British music magazine) have made an MP3 of the sessions available for download — but only for a couple more days. Grab it while you can, because it’s pretty interesting.
I keep not mentioning this too, which I found out about a couple of weeks ago: There’s a Game Show Hall of Fame! Woo-hoo!
Sorry, I’m a game show geek from way back; the old masters like Cullen, Eubanks, and yes, Barker were better than sports stars to me.
And finally, thanks so much to everybody who have been writing in and calling all day — fellow bloggers, and former coworkers — to offer condolences as to my new condition of being unemployed … although in the case of the present and former employees of the company, it’s more like the living envying the dead. Those who are still there are all stressed and panicking, assuming the worst for themselves and most everyone else.
It’s very sad, especially for those of us who remember the better days.
Oh well. Like I said yesterday: I stared down cancer. I can definitely handle this.
Several things I’ve been meaning to do, and I’m sure I won’t remember them all …
I’m finally pulling out the autumn leaf bullet point, even though the daily high temperatures are still in the low 90s, despite the attempts of a couple of weakling little “cool fronts” to crash the party …
Still, though, it’s been worse in some years past — 2005, for example — with 100+ temperatures hanging on almost until Halloween. This is better, but tonight it’s so humid that the heat index is +5.
Fortunately, I’ll be going to see my mom soon, and the nighttime lows have been around 15 degrees lower for the past couple of weeks where she lives, so that’ll be a nice crisp break.
Speaking of my mom, who, by the way, turns 87 next month, went to a high school football game last week, and got hit in the face with a football.
Don’t worry, she’s okay. She’s tough, she shook it right off.
Old folks are resilient like that.
Speaking of going to see my mom: If I weren’t the kind of person who wants to make sure that the music industry gets every penny it wants, even from 40-year-old material that isn’t even in print, here’s the album I’d make my mom a copy of: Martin Denny’s Hawaii Goes A Go-Go.
Seriously, she eats that stuff up. That shelf-top CD stereo unit I got her a couple of years ago was a great move on my part.
It’s just too bad that I’m above making illegal copies.
Nope, those three spindles full of blank CDs in my computer room are strictly in case I need to back up lots and lots of data on short notice.
Seriously.
Also speaking of that upcoming trip: I could get internet access while at my mom’s, but it’s not worth the hassle. First of all, I’m having trouble installing the CMOS battery in my old laptop, since I’m wary of taking too many parts of it apart, since you eventually get to that part of the laptop that’s pretty much impossible to get back together. (You folks who work on computers know what I mean.) Secondly, the old laptop is Windows 98, and the last time I tried to connect there, it never would connect, and the Southwestern Bell tech support people on the other side of the freaking planet were zero help at all, seeing as they had no technical knowledge at all and thus were totally dependent on their scripted flowcharts. And I’m sure not taking our new laptop unless I absolutely had to, because between baggage handlers and the security goons, there’s no guarantee that I’d actually get there and back with the thing.
And besides, it would just be a dialup connection {shudder} so it wouldn’t even be worth the trouble of hauling it there and back.
Anyway, it’ll probably do me some good to take a break from my normal 16-hours days in front of computers. Even the geek’s brain needs a break now and then.
Don’t worry though, I won’t be totally tech-deprived: I mailed my old Sega Dreamcast and several games to her house last week, so at least I’ll have something to do while I’m there. And I can leave it there for next time. Plus, for those times that relatives with kids that visit my mom, if the kids get agonizingly desperate for something to do while they’re there, they can get schooled on semi-old-school games like Ooga Booga, Space Channel 5, Bust A Move, and, of course, Sonic. Assuming they’ll be open-minded enough to try before-last-gen gaming.
Which they won’t be.
Which is too bad, because just talking about the games is making me look forward to playing …
The caller in this video is unclear on the concept of 20 Questions — he can’t even handle three … :
“Do these dwarven greaves make my butt look big?”
Seriously, I try to get around to posting, but there’s so much of life that needs living!
And there’s even more goofing off, and I find myself doing that as well, as evidenced by the above shot of my recent renewed dabbling in Oblivion.
But I’ve posted pictures, so that will do nicely for now.
These days Merv Griffin seems to be known most as a producer, but he started as an actor, and a singer, before becoming a game show host, then a talk show host, then a producer.
I don’t have any memory of watching his talk shows, but, as a game geek from early childhood, I grew up on his (and others’) game shows. My favorite (and the one with the most influence on me) was Word for Word, the little-remembered project that nevertheless gave him the producing cred to be allowed to produce his two megahits, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.
Contestants on Word for Word were given a word, and challenged to form other, usually smaller words, out of the letters in the first word. The only word I remember at this point, in one of the first episodes I ever saw, was “cranberry”, and the bonus word was “barn”. I immediately became infatuated with the show, and, more importantly, with playing with the letters in words; the fact that my domain name is an anagram of the letters in my name is living proof of this influence. I even had the board game, which I think is still somewhere in my mom’s garage..
More important than any of his other credits, though, is the general feeling that Merv was a good human being. One person on the Fark message board said:
My grandfather was a writer on the Merv Griffin Show years ago. Long after my grandfather died, my mother got cancer. Merv cut a check to help with her medical expenses. He got us through some rough times.
Bonus points: He had a sense of humor about himself, as evidenced in this scene from Steve Martin’s underrated “The Man With Two Brains”:
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