Boneshaker

Here's a good setting for a novel: 19th century Seattle, except it's not the Seattle from our history books. In this Seattle, the down-town district at least, is surrounded by an enormous wall erected after a mad scientist punched a hole deep into the earth and released a killer toxin that turned almost everyone into zombies.

The setting is also belonging to that strangest of genres: steam-punk, so there's lots of airships.





Boneshaker's fictional world follows this really strange rule: The cooler your name is, the more of a bad-ass you are.

Jeremiah Swakhammer? Bad-ass. Doctor Minnericht? Bad-ass. Lucy O'Gunning? Bad-ass with a steam-punk, robot arm. Leviticus Blue? Total bad-ass.

And you can't hide bad-assery under a more mundane name, either. Briar Wilkes was trying to fly under the bad-ass radar at the beginning of the book, but since her real name is Briar Blue? Crack shot. Scourge of zombies.

But it doesn't work the other way around. You can't give yourself a more bad-ass name than the one you already have. One character thought he could do that, and then you find out his real name is super lame and dull.

Right after you find out, on the next page, he dies.

Devil's Advocate

How about some crazy music.

Now remember: to appreciate music you need to listen to a song in it's entirety. Listening to only a fraction of a song is like looking at only a fraction of a painting.

Yeah, it's an ass.

Much better, right?

I know some of you aren't impressed by a bit of volume so don't think that the big piano swell at :40 is all this song has going for it. This is a crazy, crazy arrangement that goes a lot of different places, all of them good.

PrototypeRaptor, if you haven't heard his stuff before, usually doesn't work with orchestral samples (actually, this is the only piece of his I know that could be counted as orchestral), but it's very fun.

Devil's Advocate is a remix from Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, a bullet-hell shooter, I believe; with story elements (story elements?). If you've never heard of this game then congratulations, you're just as clueless as everyone else on this planet. The entire bullet-hell genre itself is just a sub-genre of a genre that isn't nearly as popular as it used to be twenty years ago.

Enjoy the sinister music and don't be surprised if you feel an urge to watch Beetlejuice afterwards.

Sosarian Rogue

It's time to wrap up 90's week and I can't think of a better way of doing it than with Ultima Online.

Everyone has their favorite game world. It's a special place, and it isn't special because of the game mechanics or anything you can express in words. Your favorite game world is a place that you know, without a doubt, means more to you than anyone else. You don't enjoy this world. You don't like it. You love it.

And I loved Sosaria.

Video Games in the 90's Sucked

That's right. Video games in the 90's sucked and you don't even know it.

Sure, reminisce about your Mario 64 and your Chrono Trigger and your Tekken 2. What's that? Three games? Just three?

You've got nostalgia, man. You've got it all over your face. It's disgusting.

Don't worry, man. I've got a cure. I can sober you up with just one word...

Pop Quiz, Hot-Shot,

Your hit movie just released. $100 million in the box office. Ready for a sequel. Keanu won't sign on.

What do you do?

What do you do?

Commercial Break

Remember commercials? They used to have the clout of a minor deity, demanding a few minutes of your life as a sacrifice every time you wanted to watch something on TV.

And what choice did you have? You certainly couldn't rely on VHS to skip commercials. The quality was always either bad or terrible, you needed to program the VCR ahead of time or hit record at just the right moment, and then you had to hope that nobody wanted to use the TV or else you'd end up recording something else.

NO! VHS was a false hope. I'll admit, it did give me a thrill to listen to that whirring noise as I fast-forwarded past Ronald McDonald on my way back to X-Men. It was almost like cheating death, if death counted as two to three minutes of your life.
But the price was always too high. Don't talk to me about VHS. VHS was a false prophet.

In this Tomorrowland that we live in, with video-streaming bandwidth and digital recording, if you're watching a series of back-to-back commercials then you're doing something wrong. Television advertisements have lost that terrible power that they used to hold, and while we no longer owe them a small cut of our lives, we must respect what is dead and gone.


Today we pay homage to a dead god: the commercials of the 90's.

(bow your heads)

Do You Miss Dial-Up Internet?

Of course you don't!

But I bet you miss this...