These are sites about making (with a bias to writing) comics:
And for artists, here are scanned copies of several art instruction books by Andrew Loomis, a fine illustrator from the 40s and 50s.
Assorted roleplaying links, to clear out my bookmarks.
What is Romantic Fantasy? by John Snead – The developer of Blue Rose defines the sub-genre of his game. Interesting thoughts on a whole swath of Fantasy writing that is usually looked down upon, but which pretty much defines many of the basic assumptions of “generic” fantasy. Proves my old point that RPGs are habitual scavangers of the corpses of sub-genres, i.e, that once a sub-genre has been defined into a shape you can do as an RPG, it has hardened into a list of cliches and trademark ticks.
Which is a problem for something like Cyberpunk, which has lost all novelty from it’s eighties snarl, but not for Fantasy, which thrives on comfortable familiarity.
The Primeval Games Press website has a series of interviews with indie roleplaying game designers. Here’s one with the interesting Vincent Baker, (whose game-theory blog is worth looking at) but it’s interesting to compare it to others on the site, in particular to that with the one with Chad Underkoffler, who’s much more “traditional” in outlook.
Finally, Darkpages claims to be a roleplaying game, but so far is a set of short fanfics, trying to set the mood of a dark, occultish super-hero world, similar I think to what I tried to do with “They Fight Crime!”.
Oh heck, I’ll stick this in as a PS: a summary of a talk given by the head of Guardians of Order to a group of Amber Diceless gamers about GOO’s plans for ADRPG.
Via Warren Ellis, I found an interesting site called Ethnopoetic Soundings, which has assorted weird ethnic music in MP3 format.
(Because I use Firefox, and installed the Greasemonkey extension, and installed this cool inline MP3 player script from the script repository, I get a cool little flash button next to each mp3 link in a web page, which can stream and play the file when you click it. Very cool for browsing something like that. Or reading
Warren Ellis also points to Blind Shrike, a (free) novel by Richard Kadrey. From Kadrey’s introduction:
Back around 9/11, when I saw such disparate fantasies as Hellblazer and Preacher, American Gods and Carrie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Donnie Darko living together in happy harmony in friends’ homes, I thought it would be a swell idea to write a little fantasy novel in a modern American prose style.
Damn, was I wrong.
Talking of music and free stuff, there’s also an unpublished Fiona Apple album you can download. And also a Kleptones album which photomatt has mirrored. I like Revolverlution best, I think.
Changing minds and persuasion — How we change what others think, believe, feel and do – this site is about mind control! Or rather, cheap salesman shticks, things like Feel, felt, found (I understand you feel about that. Many others have felt the same way. And what they have found is that….
) (an example of Objection handling techniques).
I feel dirty just reading this.
Rick Schaut (a Microsoft programmer working on the Macintosh version of Word, who I got to by xslf’s link to a long and patient discussion he has with a pair of AbiWord developers) posted a link to a list of funny C compiler error messages from the old Mac MPW compiler. Apparently, someone in Apple is rumoured to be adding these to the new Mac OS X compilers.
(I suspect I gave a bit too much context in that paragraph. This without mentioning that, oddly enough, I looked at AbiWord just the other day, after reading bad things about how OpenOffice now requires Java. And noticing that if I uninstalled all of MS Office from my laptop, I could have room for, oh, two more episodes of Justice League Unlimited).
Anyway, you have to admire a compiler that instead of spouting obscure gibberish actually says things like: