The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen will be re-released in the next two months
Rock.
I like to point out that there are more people in Israel playing the Baron’s game then know of Wallis’ book; and they are missing out on what is perhaps the most entertaining “game manual” ever written.
I did a stealth upgrade of the roleplay.org.il forums early Saturday morning, from a creaky old patched and hacked phorum 3 install, that had been modified by various hands, including Bo, Fogi and Hershko, and which still used visual Hebrew, to a nearly-new Phorum 5 version, with bells, whistles, RSS feeds and search that works.
Phorum 5 is a pleasantly solid PHP/MySQL project, clean and sensible code, decent docs, an import script that imports 300 thousand messages without complaint (and which is clear enough to hack – in fact the whole Phorum code is remarkably easy to hack – which is probably what got us into this mess in the first place, although the version 3 code gives me shudders), and a neat system of templates and modules seperated nicely from the core functionality (although of course it’s always missing this one hook you really-really need…)
So now I’m messing about, adding functionality, fixing mistranslations, dickering with colors and CSS and what-not, and giddy with the power of controlling every detail of this forum people are actually using. Although the glory days (several ages therof) of our forums are long gone, perhaps this will breath some life into them. The Society for the promotion of Roleplaying in Israel (that’s our official name!) has had a site for ages, and so far it has never quite lived up to it’s potential – it has giving us some remarkable applications, such as a community-wide phone book and (sigh) a once-lively-if-haughty forum (you call it elitism, we call it standards), but failed to become a major roleplaying destination. It’s probably too late now, but one can hope for better times.
I wonder how much time I should wait before I give the site a wiki…
Planetocopia, the World dream bank:
Planetocopia is a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. Some of these worlds are set in our future, some are alternate Earths, some are purely imaginary experiments in planetology, biology, sociology. They fall into four series: Tilt!, Futures, the Biosphere Variations, and Caprices.
[via Kenneth Hite]
The geology and the maps are lovely; the biology not as much.
The two big Israeli geekfests are coming up in a couple of months, and neither of them have any web-presence so far. Bigor 2007, our annual multi-day roleplaying-centric event that is the ISRP‘s tent-pole (flagpole?) is sometime in late March, Olamot (the SF&F and everything else con) should be sometime around then, and interested parties are wondering around forums, not knowing who to call.
This is a bit sad, really.
The Covenant looks like a pretty peculiar movie – one reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes described it as Harry Potter re-cast with underwear models, another says it really wishes it was Lost Boys; it’s like one of those teenage supernatural horror movies with sexy young actors, except with kewl powerz, romance and homoerotic high-school rivalry replacing the horror. The official site proclaims it is from the producers of Underworld
, which would explain a lot: it has a similar feel of relentlessly harvesting all the cool bits from a roleplaying game, of shame and guilt-free revelry in genre tropes worn smooth by constant fanboy groping. It looks to have none of Lost Boys‘ humor and charisma, and no sign of Kate Beckinsale(*) in black vinyl.
The bit with the car looks neat, though.
It’s so unoriginal that someone’s claiming they stole the script from him. On an internet forum.
* – Speaking of Kate Beckinsale, I recently saw her in this. Black stockings, white apron – you’d think she picks her roles based on their fetishistic appeal.