[X] My Assistant

[paws2sky]

Watching: The original Battlestar Galactica. Other than bits and pieces of episodes here and there, I've never watched this show (I've never seen the new one either, but that's beside the point). I rcently discovered it on NBC.com and I have to say, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

-paws

[Synner667]

Reading - Just finished Walter Jon William's 1996 cyberpunk classic, Hardwired.

Along with Neuromancer, Bladerunner, Terminator, RoboCop and Bubblegum Crisis, it really defined cyberpunk for me...
...And it's even better if you have a copy of the CP2020 supplement, Hardwired.

I read it about once a year, and am always blown away the story, the characters, the setting, the atmosphere.

So many of the things we've come to expect from cyberpunk are there.

Totally recommended.

[Critias]

Amen. Hardwired has been one of my favorite books for a long, long, time. It was one of the first novels I ever read, and every time I pick it back up it reminds me of just how much it shaped what I expect a book -- cyberpunk or otherwise -- to deliver.

[Spooky Jack]

Reading: Most of these I've finished or continue to read, but they're worth noting =)

Fiction:
Alien Shores, Feast of Souls, The Coldfire Trilogy (all by CS Friedman)... the first is sci-fi (reminds me a lot of shadow run, but with aliens) and the latter are fantasy (though the Coldfire books manage to merge both seamlessly).

Anything by Terry Pratchet, from Good Omens to his Discworld series.

Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. The imagination and scope of his novels is astounding, especially if you consider how long ago he wrote them.

Non-Fiction:
Three Cups of Tea (phenomenal book that while presenting one man's extreme journey from Mountain Climber to a builder of schools in Pakistan also manages to shed light on the Taliban and current events in Afghanistan). Truly inspirational.

Webcomics: The Order of the Stick, Girl Genius, Erfworld and User Friendly

Watching: Nothing right now unfortunately. I'm stuck on a ship with no cable access for half a year lol. That said...

Trigun Anime(starts a little slow with a horrid recap episode half way through that gets much better around episode 12 or so when the plot starts to really reveal itself)

Dexter... what can I say? A serial killer that kills serial killers, and works for the cops? Two seasons watched and still hooked.

Equilibrium: The gun kata... with great plot and action... nuff said.

Playing: my first SR game (hopefully) and World of Warcraft (yes... I'm one of them).

[Backgammon]

Reading - Just finished Walter Jon William's 1996 cyberpunk classic, Hardwired
Totally recommended.

Amen. Hardwired has been one of my favorite books for a long, long, time. It was one of the first novels I ever read, and every time I pick it back up it reminds me of just how much it shaped what I expect a book -- cyberpunk or otherwise -- to deliver.

On my Amazon to-buy list now, thanks guys.

[Blade]

Reading:
books:
Finally completed all Chandler's novel. Great inspiration for Shadowrun (Noir mixes so well with cyberpunk) and wise-cracks and descriptions that are just too good to pass. Currently reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Well written, amazing how it can keep me interested despite the lack of actual content.

comics:
Dungeon: a fun but sometimes deep parody of sword and sorcery worlds. Looks like it has been translated in English.
Corto Maltese: A great series with some of the best characters ever (Corto Maltese and Rasputin) that could be great inspiration for Shadowrun games, even if it's set in the early 20th century.
Canardo : A series following the Noir adventures of a depressive alchoholic anthropomorphic duck. Gritty and funny at the same time.

Watching: Nothing much right now. Recently seen Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill and trying to get hold of Russ Meyer's other movies.

Playing:
RPGs:
GMing a Shadowrun campaign in Hamburg that's getting grittier and gritter as time goes on.
GMing an insane pink-mohawk Shadowrun campaign where the PC are trying to save the true spirit of true punk and prevent it from being used and abused by the corps.
Playing a short Dark Heresy campaign. Fun.
Playing other games from time to times (a "gangsta-style" Shadowrun campaign, a cyberpunk-in-space hard sci-fi homegame and some Dying Earth RPG).

Video Games:
Finished Dreamfall. Not game-y enough to truely deserve the name of "game" but such an amazing and deep story... And an ending that really shook me (and not just because it's a huge cliffhanger).
Started playing Capitalism 2 and trying to get Aztechnology to the top of the corporate world.
Lots of various free indie games.

[Wesley Street]

Video Games: Just completed Call of Duty 4. A bit short but one of the best FPSes I've ever played. I hope Modern Warfare is brought back further down the line because I find WW2 to be tremendously boring outside of flight sims and strategy games. I've put about an hour into Dead Space on Hard mode and I've got the hang of it now.

Comics: I read a crap-ton of comic books but I wanted to bring City of Dust to everyone's attention. One part Blade Runner, one part Equilibrium, one part monster movie.

Books: Street Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse. Yet another book about life as a gang-banger in the early 90s. Lots of choice and interesting bits about the lifestyle. I picked up a book on Pablo Escobar at a $1 hardback book sale.

Watching: The Tudors, which desperately makes me want to pitch a "rise of the aristocrats" Shadowrun storyline. Or at least write a new London sourcebook.

[Synner667]

Reading - Just finished Burning Chrome.
Wow !! A long time since I've read it, and I'd forgotten so much about how good it was [though I do try and get people to read it as the 1st part of the Sprawl set].

Since it's William G's early stuff [some of it's from 1977 !!], it's really raw and unpolished, compare to Neuromancer.

Really reminds me why I got into cyberpunk as a genre, and shows the gulf between what people wrote and envisioned, and what games ended up with - Very sad, really.

[Synner667]

Reading: Most of these I've finished or continue to read, but they're worth noting =)
Anything by Terry Pratchet, from Good Omens to his Discworld series.

Try Terry's early SciFi stuff [Strata, Dark Side of the Sun], and see the ideas that grew into the Discworld.

Equilibrium: The gun kata... with great plot and action... nuff said.

Heard good things about it, and even have a copy, butI just haven't got around to watching it yet.

[paws2sky]

Watching: Just watched Blade Runner Final Cut a couple nights ago. I've owned it for a while, but never made time to sit down with it. Overall, it was Blade Runner. I really miss the voice over narration. The video is so much cleaner than any version I've seen though; it really looks sharp.

-paws

[Backgammon]

Reading: The Electric Church as per another DSFer's recommendation. A bit cliché but some serious old school cyberpunk. Enjoyable so far for its undiluted cyberpunkness.

Movies/TV: Watching True Blood on HBO. A mix of Buffy and Anne Rice novels. Lots of titties and sex. Love Sookie, she has such a sweet innocence that contrasts well with the Louisiana background. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm REEEAALLY enjoying it. Like, I look forward to getting home to watch it sort of thing. Season 2 starts soon, though the 3 episode a night thing HBO was running was part of the pleasure.

Gaming: Playing Gears 2. Suprisingly short game, I'm almost done. It was ok, didn't think it quite deserves its hype though. As I've posted seperatly, Dead Space which I finished a few weeks ago, was totally awesome.

[Wesley Street]

Watching: Just finished Sky Crawlers, an alternate universe air-war anime by Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame. Beautifully shot and some of the best air battle scenes I've seen in any film, live action or animated. Filled with typical Oshii trademarks: long periods of quiet, sprinkled with fish-eye lens shots and emotionless, haunted stares of the film's protagonists, Kenji Kawaii music score, rain, the repetition of day-to-day life and a basset hound.

Let the Right One In, a Scandinavian vampire film about a bullied 12-year old boy named Oskar who falls in love with his new neighbor, a cute, haunted looking girl who teaches him to stand up for himself. The girl, Ellie, also struggles to not drain his blood. There were parts about this film that I really liked, especially the genuine awkwardness portrayed by a tweenager trying to find his place in the world that seems against him and that it chucks the shitty Twilight effete male vampire/Mary Sue teen wangst on its ass. Ellie began to smell bad when she was hungry for blood and couldn't eat real food. There were some very genuinely tender moments that you can only pull off with characters who barely understand the concept of adult sexuality. It's a little slow though, for, what is supposed to be a horror film. It's more Ingmar Bergman by way of John Hughes than Wes Craven.

Reading: I picked up Exposure by Kurt Wenzel at a $1 book sale and tell me this blurb doesn't sound like an excellent idea for a SR plot: "Los Angeles, a few years from now. Technology has digitally resurrected the long-dead stars of Hollywood's golden era. Electronic billboards cover every available surface in the city, beaming out a constant flood of commercials featuring the likes of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and - the great exception, the last "real" movie star - Colt Reston.

Not everyone is thrilled. A group of anti-tech rebels have begun to deface and destroy the billboards that flash above the palm tree-lined boulevards. Their inspiration is the Black Book, a mysterious manifesto warning against the evils of "media saturation" that has caused a sensation around town. No one knows who the author is but there are plenty of people who want to find out."

[Critias]

Everyone needs to watch Fanboys. Not necessarily for any tie-in to gaming (though there is a grappling hook!), but just because most of us are soundly in their target audience bracket, and it's a great film to make you feel good about Star Wars.

[paws2sky]

Everyone needs to watch Fanboys. Not necessarily for any tie-in to gaming (though there is a grappling hook!), but just because most of us are soundly in their target audience bracket, and it's a great film to make you feel good about Star Wars.

My wife, who loves Fanboys, has tried to get me to watch it repeatedly. I find it horribly uninteresting though. There's nothign specific I can put my finger on... it just doesn't hold my attention. *shrug*

-paws

[ravensmuse]

Waiting for my turn at the library to pick it up. Just want that email...

Reading - Star Wars: Saga Edition. Also, transgender superhero fiction.

Watching - Kathy Griffin: My Life On the D-List, Burn Notice, the Soup, the Goode Family, Wipeout!

I heart Kathy Griffin. She seems like she was that kid in school that was unafraid of telling the cool kids that they were dumb while at the same time trying "desperately" to get in with them to get into the cool parties. Maybe people will find that weird, but its funny at the same time. I also don't think she's as D-List as she thinks she is, but plays it up big time for laughs.

The Goode Family: You should be watching this if you like Mike Judge because it is Mike Judge. It's the polar opposite of King of the Hill; the Goodes are a "green" family that tries to live their lives the "green" way. They make their own soap, get their food from their garden, and not impose their "western" ways on people. Yet, you can see that they're not entirely devoted to it - the wife definitely falls into the category of, "I originally got into this to piss off my ex-military dad" and parts of that life come out sometimes (like when her son started playing football and she turned into a crazy football mom / hooligan) and the Dad is that sweet, naive, doesn't mean anything kind of guy that always ends up getting himself into trouble for trying to do the right thing.

tl;dr: if you cynically think the Green movement can be a little dumb and overzealous sometimes, watch this show. It's sweet sometimes.

And yeah, I watch a lot of celebrity related things. I blame my significant other.

Playing - Haven't bought anything new in awhile, though I did get in a few good hours with Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core last weekend. Holy schnikies, its like switching from Street Fighter 2 to Street Fighter 2: Turbo. New movesets, new overkills, dust loops fooled around with...still did better than I thought I'd do.

Working On - Finishing the novel I've tried to finish four times before.

[Synner667]

Just finished reading Spook Country [by William Gibson].
Quite disappointed, to be honest. If it was another writer, I'd probably not behave bothered to buy it and read it.

It's a story set in the world-of-now, revolving around iPods, a family of career spies and [most interesting] artists creating augmented reality setpieces that can only be viewed by the re;levant hardware - that almost no-one has access to.

Anyone who's read the Sprawl Set will recognise the main elements - drugs, technology used in new ways, detailed people, etc.


Like many people I want a new Sprawl Set, for more stuff about Molly Millions, the Finn and the world they live in >sigh<

[Garwllwyd]

Currently partitioning my time between The Mabinogion and Le Morte d'Arthur. I'm a classic kinda guy at heart.

Currently watching the final season of The Shield.

[Freejack]

Reading: Matheson's Omega Man (1970's). I found it when I was putting my books away. When it was published in 1954, it was called "I Am Legend"

Last Movie Watched: Forget the name but it was about the Russian Mob in London. They're The Vory and since we're playing in Denver, it really was interesting. Especially "I got my stars!" "A Russian's history in Prison is written in Tattoo's" and the star on the knee "because you don't kneel to anyone".

Should make for an interesting Denver Missions session (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Gaming: Preparing for Sunday's game. Missions SRM02-16 - Primal Forces. I'm using a Mac so I have several phrases by the Panda and will use the 'say' program to have it chatting throughout the game (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) I'm also re-reading the original modules starting last week with DNA/DOA.

Physical: Creating my woodshop in the garage on the weekend. Built a sturdy set of shelves for garage storage and now I'm working on a nice work bench. Using Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) for the first time (most of the big pieces), making drawers for the first time, really using a dado set of blades, and using stronger wood (oak) for the first time. Most of my projects have been plywood and pine so I'm moving up into the next tier.

Carl

[kanislatrans]

Reading:Shadows of Europe, and the Fastenal catalog ...more info in the latter,but the plot is pretty thin.. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Watching: Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. and Shoot 'em up.

Playing: Fallout 3 and Prototype.

[Backgammon]

Last Movie Watched: Forget the name but it was about the Russian Mob in London. They're The Vory and since we're playing in Denver, it really was interesting. Especially "I got my stars!" "A Russian's history in Prison is written in Tattoo's" and the star on the knee "because you don't kneel to anyone".

That would be Eastern Promises by David Cronenberg.

[Adarael]

I have... a really strange question.

I'm currently running an Exalted game, and was thinking about classical influnces on exalted. You know, the Odyssey, the Illiad, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, et cetera.

Does anyone know of a decent english translation of The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan, 水滸傳, aka "Suikoden" in Japanese - which inspired the game of the same name)? I'm interested in reading it, but apparently most of the translations are crap, especially the Pearl S. Buck translation

[AJCarrington]

Watching: Just finished Sky Crawlers, an alternate universe air-war anime by Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame. Beautifully shot and some of the best air battle scenes I've seen in any film, live action or animated. Filled with typical Oshii trademarks: long periods of quiet, sprinkled with fish-eye lens shots and emotionless, haunted stares of the film's protagonists, Kenji Kawaii music score, rain, the repetition of day-to-day life and a basset hound.

Just watched this last night - really, really, really good. Can't help but think this would be great inspiration for Crimson Skies.

Have also finished watching Black Lagoon seasons 1 and 2 - pretty good overall. Suitably over the top with an equally bizarre collection of characters: gun-smuggling nuns, maid assassin, twin teenage serial killers, "Chinglsih", chainsaw-wielding cleaner mixed in with neo-nazis, yakuza, terrorists and pretty much anyone else with an excuse to carry a gun. Not sure if "good fun" is an apt description, but it was pretty entertaining.

AJC

[PBTHHHHT]

Have also finished watching Black Lagoon seasons 1 and 2 - pretty good overall. Suitably over the top with an equally bizarre collection of characters: gun-smuggling nuns, maid assassin, twin teenage serial killers, "Chinglsih", chainsaw-wielding cleaner mixed in with neo-nazis, yakuza, terrorists and pretty much anyone else with an excuse to carry a gun. Not sure if "good fun" is an apt description, but it was pretty entertaining.

From what I've heard an OVA has been greenlighted for the next installment. If you like the series, you may like reading the manga, the ordering is a bit different than from the series, but it's basically all there. Plus the latest book has the start of more craziness as the Garcia family returns to city, more maid assassin action, more mercenary action, more Hotel Moscow, let's see the body count rise.

[AJCarrington]

Thanks for the heads up - should be interesting to see where they take an OVA. Never thought about looking into the manga - will have to do that.


Regards,

AJC

[fistandantilus4....]

Jsut read Way of the Shadows by Brent Weeks. The back of the book sounds like a cliche ("kid raised from the street by ruthless assassin. Can't have any close friends"), but believe me, this book is bad ass, and gritty. Has it's own world, which has an amazing amount of bleakness to it, with a fair bit of redemption, unique magic (almost ED - ish in a way), and very slick characters and development. Don't read it though if you don't want to read about kids getting hurt, as there is some of that in there.

It's how I imagine Kratas would be.