Vermé Scriptorium

I’ve come to a realization this afternoon.

I am blessed with the circumstances that life has provided to me, in that, at this time, I am afforded the luxury of working out of my house as a freelance graphic designer. This situation may not last for long. However, it will be the status quo for the forseeable future in the Kramer Household™. In configuring the layout of my desktop, I have before me, my blessed iMac and its second monitor. Above this, I have a 22″ flat screen TV that I will sometimes loop DVD’s throughout the day for white noise. To the right of all this, I have my trusty 15″ MacBook Pro. During non-business hours, my MacBook is used to monitor family financial issues, my iTunes library, and of course, is my primary tool for all things OSRIC and First Edition.

Why even bring this up?

My MacBook, from time to time, runs TV shows or movies from Hulu.com.

So what? I like to have TV running while I am working. Most people like to have the radio on for audial distraction while they’re working. I like to have the TV running in the background for the same reason. Get over it.

Back to the point I wanted to make;

Today, I surfed in to Hulu.com and loaded up The Outer Limits. (Ordinarily, I’m not an Outer Limits groupie. I rather fancy Twilight Zone and Night Gallery instead.)

But then, I started paying more attention to the plots, scripts, and use of lighting. And I came to the conclusion; today’s shows pale in comparison to these shows. Why? Because these older shows did not have the ability to dress a scene up with tons of color. (How many police stations in real-life actually have glass office walls and neon-blue mood lighting? If you would believe contemporary shows like CSI, and Criminal Minds all of them are thusly decorated.) They also could not make a scene more exciting without slick computer graphics. (I’m a huge fan of the LoTR movies, and actually watch all the bonus material more frequently than I watch the movies themselves. One thing they make clear in these “Appendices” is that any filmed sequence can be cleaned up in post-production. Need to add a new creature? No problem, the CGA geeks will just add it in during post-production. Your background supposed to have a volcano, and not a skyscraper? Not a problem, we’ll drop it in during post-production.) But back in the 1960′s, if it wasn’t in the scene while it was filmed, it wasn’t going to be in the scene at all. The director had to make things happen in the camera. And the writing, the lighting, the script, the actors, the director; all had to tell the story, in the camera.

For all their ‘bad’ production values, I tend to think as a result, these older shows are better for the most part than their modern counterparts. Newer shows tend to just wanna be vehicles for some CG artist’s portfolio, at the cost of a show’s plot, acting, and directing. Makes me realize that’s probably why I like movies like 12 Angry Men and Duel.

Good gaming,

Steve Jobs dies; Apple co-founder was 56

In 1986, I had very first encounter with a Macintosh computer. It was small back then; the case roughly 10 x 12 x 12 inches, the screen was perhaps an 8 inch diagonal. It came loaded with 256K of RAM, and I am being generous if I say it had a 20 megabyte hard drive. The single application it came with was called MacPaint. As a graphic design student at the time, if I ever had a need to paint 2 bit brick wall patterns, I might have been more excited about this strange little device. But we all walked out the presentation shaking our heads, laughing, and saying, “Yeah, as if…”

Fast forward years, and I found myself working at a high-end commercial printer, working in the art department. We were still doing all our paste-up using waxers, rubber cement, and non-repro blue pencils. Client presentations were executed with markers, or else fully comped up the artists using color keys, or test print runs.

One day, while were sitting happily among all the toxic vapors that markers, rubber cement, and film processing solution make (those were fun days, though I frequently went home with a headache), the owner of the print shop escorts into the art department a gentleman who is pushing a cart of white boxes. The large Garamond lettering on the boxes read, “Apple Macintosh.” I think, he must have gone over to the public market near the freeway, but why so many apples?

Well, of course it wasn’t apples. The owner of this print shop just decided on this day, that his art department was going to enter the computer age. The technician got all the machines set-up, plugged in, and turned. The shop owner then said we were to start using these machines on Monday morning (this was a Thursday as I recall). He then walked out, confident, we would have it figured out. Terrified? Yes, as a matter of fact I was. I didn’t even know how to turn the damned thing on.

Today, I couldn’t imagine my life without my iMac, my MacBook Pro, my kids’ eMac, my wife’s iPad, my iPod, and all the other wonderful things this visionary from ’70′s has brought us. I never knew him, never met him, and probably would never find my path ever crossing his at any point in the future, but I will miss him terribly. The consumer computer world has lost its best friend. Good-bye, Steve. And thank you for a life-time.

Good gaming,

I don’t often like the myriad “documentaries” I find on Dungeons & Dragons that I run across from time to time on the internet. Typically, I find these continue to perpetuate the stereo-typical anti-social assumptions that those whodo not  play think those of us who do must suffer from. However, today I watched a film called The Dungeons Masters. The film follows the exploits of three dungeons masters over the course of year. The first 30 minutes of course shows how bizarre and geeky these people are; the first DM (can’t recall his name…sorry…I’ll just call him ‘Bob’ for the purposes of this write-up) is an apartment manager by virtue of the fact that he is unemployed, ‘Richard’ is becoming increasingly frustrated by his group of players and their bad playing and general pettiness, and ‘Elizabeth’ is a young woman who dresses as a drow elf…painting herself head to toe in black body paint. After seeing the later, I thought to myself, here we go again.

About 30 to 45 minutes into the film though, the filmmakers start to reveal the human side of these people. And surprisingly, I found myself very interested in what happens to these them.

Bob’s journey takes him on a rollercoaster-ride as he attempts to launch a career as a scifi-writer and a cable-access TV host. His story is both crushing and up-lifting as you see him go from self-doubt, to elation, to defeat, and finally to success and redemption.

Richard goes through the trials of the frustrated DM who has a group of players not happy with the fact that, due to their own bad decision-making during the course of a game, all die. They willingly and without DM-prodding, all jump into a sphere of annihilation. And the players all apparently got upset with the DM, picked up their toys, and left. This guy is fun to follow as we watch him decide to close his game group, tell his non-gaming wife he’s getting rid of his game books (which he never does), and then try to take care of ‘normal life’…he’s dangerous with a chain saw, by the way.

Elizabeth…yes, at first, I thought this young lady was a freak. I mean, who dresses up as a drow elf, painted head to toe in black body paint…just because. I was dumb-founded. But as the circumstances of her life and relationships unfold, I really began to feel for her situation in life.

D&D’ers are human. We go through the same troubles as everyone else. And by the way, none of these people are shown to be Satan worshiping psychopaths. You should check it out. I found it on Hulu.com.

Good gaming,

So, I was perusing my Facebook page, and one of those ads that get placed on the right-hand side of the screen caught my eye. It was announcing the BluRay release of the Star Wars saga, set for September 16 (2011) (http://www.youtube.com/starwars). Being the eternal geek, I just had to go see what this was about. It has lots of cool stuff, with links to all six movies. Contains a few movie clips, a little documentary-type stuff, craps loads of production stills. All this linked by a handy scrolling thumbnail bar at the bottom of the screen.

Clicking was nostalgic fun, seeing allot of informational clips, and production drawings that I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

Clicked on to the Episode V (Empire Strikes Back) panel. Reviewed the thumbnails at the bottom. Came a across a listing for the ‘Space Slig Storyboard’? Huh? I’m not a professor of Star Wars by any stretch. Never been to a convention, and never pretended to be a Jedi in a lightsaber duel with my Darth Maul replica saber. It just sits on my wall, collects dust, and waits for me to show it off to my kids’ friends every once in a while.

But I don’t think I have heard of a ‘space slig’…oh!, space SLUG! That’s what it means…

…a typo, on a web page for what it is undoubtedly one of the most successful movie franchises in history (try to argue it’s not, you wont succeed). Now, I know I am not world’s best speller, or typist. And I make loads of mistakes if I am not very, very…very…careful. But this is a major product release by a very large corporation. Don’t these things get edited and proofread like, for months on end?

‘Space Slig’!? Seriously? Well, at least now I don’t feel so bad when I let a typo of two get through.

Good gaming,