Posts from — July 2007

Yesterday I mentioned the cool papercraft coffins at Ravensblight.com — I’ve got one on my desk as I type this.  And right next to it is another papercraft model that is, if this is possible, even cooler.  It’s a “Shambler” from the video game Quake. Remember that? It was the first papercraft model I ever assembled and it was relatively simple to make.  Just print the .pdfs on heavy paper, ideally from a color printer, cut them out with an x-acto blade, fold and glue ‘em up with normal white glue.  I became quite addicted to papercraft for a little while last summer since it’s so cheap and the models can be pretty darned fantastic.

 http://cow.mooh.org/paper/

Ravensblight.com is a fun, well-conceived and executed concept website that takes as its central metaphor a haunted town. The MOST fun part for me at least was the “Toystore” which features a couple DOZEN creepy papercraft models to print out and build.

Papercraft for those not familiar with it is a craft somewhat similar to origami in that you start with a flat sheet of paper and you end up with a three-dimensional object. But since the “rules” of papercraft allow scissors and elaborately printed paper, the object are — to be blunt– WAY cooler than origami. The technique behind papercraft is a pretty cool mixture of high-tech and low-tech. High tech computer-aided-design tools are used to create 3-d models of things… in Ravensblight’s case, for instance, mechanical bats or the tiny coffins shown above. Then another program “unfolds” the object into a 2-d surface and saves it as a .pdf. From a crafter’s perspective, it’s all low-tech simple: all you have to do is download the .pdf’s, print them with a color printer ideally on stiff paper and assemble. It’s a great rainy day activity and heck it’s a blast to have a little line of coffins on your desk!

http://www.ravensblight.com

(Male, middle-aged) You can’t honestly tell me that most of the nightmares that people submit aren’t more like this one. Just painful, realistic work-place related stupidity. And I should probably mention that I’m sitting here in the MIDDLE of my vacation, when my dreams should be about swimming pools and pina coladas and here I am dreaming about the jerks I work with who are miles away.

So in the dream, I’m at work and it’s kind of a strange building. It feels a little bit like a subway station because there’s ceramic tile on the walls and floor. The secretary’s desk is also covered with this gray ceramic tile. I’m in a hallway and the hallway is filled with people going this way and that. A woman I work with — she’s got red hair and a green pant suit — walks up to me and starts accosting me even before she gets very close to me. “There you are! Why haven’t you replied to that e-mail I sent you? I’ve sent you TWO e-mails and you haven’t replied to either one…” But what was really strange is that she didn’t even slow down to yell all this at me. She just kept walking past me until by the very end she was probably 30 feet away, walking backward, yelling louder. The woman didn’t really have any interest in communicating what her problem was much less in getting my help to fix it. It seemed she just wanted to yell at someone for a little while.

I guess the real nightmare is that’s exactly the kind of situation I have to look forward to when I go back to work.

(Female, early 40’s) My partner and I were visiting a friend of mine and her girl friend in Chicago. We went out to this strange restaurant that had a menu as thick as a phone book and it was all arranged by, for instance, the cut of meat that would be used. When the waiter took the order, he said something like “I shall do my utmost to insure your satisfaction” or something hokey like that, like that phrase was the tagline for the restaurant, something that all the waiters said.

At some point during the meal, I tried to open my laptop computer and I discovered that all of the screws holding it together had disappeared. What’s particularly weird is that the computer started to fall apart like a huge deck of cards, y’know, like a stack of computer chips and the case and the screen all sliding around. For some reason I thought the monitor might explode and even worse, I didn’t want my partner to know that the computer was falling apart. The laptop is where I have all my doctoral research stored and since my partner is the “computer-person” in our relationship I didn’t want this little mishap to spoil dinner.

So I went to the bathroom and there was a tiny, kid sized toy washbasin with an old-fashioned water pump that was bright blue, red and yellow. I decided to hide my computer in the cabinet underneath because I thought no one would ever find it there.

In the town where I grew up there was a movie theatre - the Calvin on Michigan Avenue - that was the perfect high school date spot. For $1.25 you could see two movies - one was some film on its second run so the film was always a little battered and scratched, and the other film, well, trust me, you’d never even heard of the second film on the bill.  They were “straight to video” releases before anyone had videotape players.  Anyway, for not too much pocket money, you could bring a date and hold hands in the dark or heck, just get away from the parents for awhile. And sometimes the movies weren’t too bad.

When I went away to college, I discovered another kind of double feature, one where not only are both movies good but when they are shown together on the same night a neat sort of “discussion” starts between the films. The first one I saw was Casablanca played on the same bill as Woody Allen’s Play it Again Sam.  Though video pretty much killed the little film revue theatres, now we have the ability to make our own homerolled double features. And our double features don’t have to include snotty art house film; they can be horror movies.

The big idea for this column are suggestions for two films that might work really well together, either based on their theme, a common actor, a common situation…whatever.  And the films don’t necessarily have to be “good.” Putting one film in the right context sometimes makes different aspects noticeable, and often this means that a film that might initially be dismissed as mediocre might actually have something more profound going on.  Or for that matter, sometimes a film that’s passable on its own completely falls apart when shown beside another work. That’s the fun here.

We all get to play Dr Frankenstein.  What are fantastic “Creature Double Features” you’ve concocted? How’d they turn out?

Zombies invaded my household awhile back and occupied my family’s attentions night after night for several weeks. By “zombies” I of course mean the addictively amusing table game from Twilight Creations. I’m not enough of a game aficianado to know the correct term for this kind of game; it is card-based but also has a board that is assembled piece by piece as the game progresses. And the coolest part of the game perhaps are the plastic zombies that serve as obstacles to the players. In the expansion sets, there are even cooler variants of these zombies including glow-in-the-dark “radioactive” zombies and zombie dogs.

The object of the game should be familiar to anyone who knows a thing or two about zombies and that is, brute survival - and since only one person can fly away on that helicopter at the end (the victory condition) the side objective is making sure that other players don’t escape before you do. The theme changes nicely based on the different expansion sets, ranging from Night of the Living Dead (zombies original recipe), Dawn of the Dead (zombies in the mall), Day of the Dead (military zombies) and on to zombie dogs, college zombies and sewer zombies. Our household has got ‘em all and they’re all great though the expansion sets, obviously require the original Zombies! game. One piece of advice I’d pass along is to pick up an extra “Bag o’ Zombies.” The number of zombies figures in the starter box isn’t really enough for even a middle sized game. And who wants to run out of zombies?

The artwork on the cards graphically illustrates the action of the card. In fact there are a couple cards whose illustrations are so intense that my daughter insists we take them out of play. The only drawback to the game that we’ve found is that the board sometimes ends up snaking out larger than our table, especially when adding an expansion set. The remedy that we’ve found is to push all the furniture to the edges of the room and play on the floor!

In short, Zombies! is a blast. Games without an expansion set seem to take a little over an hour which is a nice length for an evening’s entertainment — with an expansion set or two… well, don’t start one of those if you don’t want to be occupied til the wee hours. And heck, Zombies! or any table game is a great excuse to shut off the TV and actually look at the members of your household.

http://www.twilightcreationsinc.com/zombies/