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Dungeons & Dragons Fan Film: Memories!

A friend at work sent me a video about Dungeons & Dragons video about Dungeons & Dragons and true love. Having been a gamer since I was nine years old, I found this video extremely funny. I spent many a long day between the years of 9 and 15 in playing Dungeons & Dragons. I had a great time. The sad thing is that I tended to consider my gaming as a creative outlet. Here’s a quick story: I was around 12 years old at the time and my friends were 13. I was always a bit younger because of how my birthday fell. Most people are 18 or 19 when they graduate high school while I was 17. So here’s the setup for this story: Imagine three guys and a girl playing Dungeons & Dragons in my room. I was 12 years old. I was able to convince one of the girls I knew from grade school to come play a game of D&D with my group. I had really wanted to impress this girl by having all of my friends behave and us all having a great time. Sadly, it didn’t go that way.

In my room, we had two bunk beds set next to each other and two bureaus so the room was pretty full with furniture (my brother and I shared a room in growing up). I had my books and dice set up on the one bed and the rest of my friends were crammed on the next bed. I had the battle scenes and the adventure all planned out but chaos broke out. It seems that my friends couldn’t control themselves with a girl being in the room. I don’t remember who but one of the guys jumped up and turned the lights off and the guys started goofing off pretending they were fighting the monsters. This obviously didn’t impress my female friend (she wasn’t my girlfriend. Heck, I was 12 years old and didn’t get the gumption to ask a girl out for another 4 years!) who never came back to another game.

I think I can count on my one hand the amount of women I know who have played D&D. Typically, the girls would try the game because it’s what their boyfriend or fiancé wanted them to do. They’d try a few games and that would be the end of it. However, there are two women friends of mine who were really into the game and were great at playing the game. They were both really fun to play with. It’s sad though that the D&D gamer gets such a bad rap with being geeky and dorky. I haven’t played D&D since the mid ‘90s and I wonder if people still play. With the online world of virtual gaming being so popular (Everquest, etc.), I wonder if people just do that instead.

Still, there has to be something said about how fun it was to sit around with a group of friends and use one’s imagination. These days I play Magic: The Gathering because it’s easy to learn (yet complicated enough that the game doesn’t grow stale) and fun. It can be played in person or online. And with the limited amount of time I have these days, playing online is my best option. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to the fact that I’d really like to play some D&D with some friends from time to time. The problem now is that we’re all so far from each other and have families. It’s not easy to just pick up and play at someone’s house. It might be possible to play with Skype and conference everyone on the call, but it’s not the same thing.

I’m telling you: Sitting around the table, getting pizza delivered, having some soda, and just playing the game for a few hours is a heck of a lot of fun. I’ve always wanted to get people together and play around Halloween, having a special one night event. But again, it’s not easy to get everyone together to play (there’s babysitters to hire, schedules to work out, etc.). It’s not impossible to organize but it comes down to: With so little free time available, how many people want to waste it on sitting around playing D&D? Not many. But I do miss those tournament games that I’d hold around Halloween. Basically, I’d tell the players to roll up their characters several weeks in advance and work with each person to clear their character. Then I’d set the game up so that one team had to fight and kill off the other team. Yes, it wasn’t very creative but I was 13 at the time! My friends and I loved it. It was like playing Quake or Doom but it was with paper, pencils, and dice. We had a great time finding cool treasures and just having a blast. That’s what we did back in the ‘80s. We didn’t have a lot of money and there weren’t too many place to go to so we played D&D. Seeing the Google video brought back some smiles for me!

Work Continues

Busy weekend. Saw lots of friends, played some games, had all our kids hang out, and really had a good time. Early in the day on Saturday an old friend from high school came over with his wife and four girls. Seeing my son play with the four girls was pretty funny: At first, my son seemed a bit overwhelmed but he adjusted fine. Before my friend left, I went up to a box of stuff that I had unpacked from the move and I gave him a sound forge hardware piece that used to connect to the Amiga computer that we both had back in 1989. My friend had lent me the sound digitizer way back then and I had never given it back to him. Well, never say never as they say. My friend took the piece and laughed seeing how old it was and told me that he still has his Amiga packed up in his basement. I sold mine about five years ago on eBay. Unfortunately, there comes a point in which you just run out of space for old computers that you don’t use any longer so I opted to make a few hundred dollars off of the old thing.

Back in 1989, the Amiga was a glorious computer. With true multi-tasking and stereo sound (and excellent video capabilities for a machine back then), the Amiga 2000 was my first real computer outside of the Commodore 64. I used it to write, create a newsletter (The Menagerie) that a girlfriend and myself put together (with help from other students) from my college, play music, watch video, surf bulletin board systems, and play games. The Amiga was a great machine. It’s funny to see how much has changed in the last 16 years. Now a small laptop can blow away anything that the Amiga was able to do. Heck, even the iPod video is pretty darn impressive compared to the breadbox sized Amiga. But back then, it was a great PC. I loved it.

In other news, work on the house continues. I painted some trim (one coat on Saturday and another on Sunday) in the basement and then fixed two cracks in the living room ceiling. I’m hoping to go home tonight and continue prep on the walls. I have to clean the walls in preparation for them being painted, but first I have two holes (from nails) that I need to touch up with spackle. We also received some other good house news: Our two sofas for the basement should be delivered on Thursday. Having them before the super bowl and the Olympics is extremely nice. We had thought that we weren’t getting these until late February. I’m really looking forward to finishing the last details of the basement. After the sofas, we just need to bring down two bookshelves and get some curtains. (The bookshelves won’t be brought down until I finish the front living room, turning it into the library.)

Speaking of which: I am so looking forward to unpacking all of my books. I have boxes and boxes of them unpacked. It’ll be nice to be able to straighten up the house and put all of those books away (as well as putting away all of the DVDs and such I have into the basement). Little by little we’re getting there.

Finally, I performed a recording test for The Magic Sock while on a call using Skype and my PC crashed. Seems that I can’t run all the software necessary on one machine. A friend suggested that I use Skype and the recording software on another machine. Then I can record the video from my main machine. That should work fine. Still, I’m leaning toward doing another episode without video and just voice. I’ve been really impressed with the sound quality of Castblaster along with all the sound clips that I can play. We’ll have to see what I can come up with. I’d like to do another episode soon. I just need to make the time.

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I sent off an e-mail to Adam Curry today after listening to the most recent issue of the Daily Source Code podcast.  He has been talking a lot about the Podsafe Music Network and Podcast Delivery Network but I’m a bit confused about when different parts of those networks will be going live so that both users and podcasters will be able to try the services out.  I’m most interested in two things: When will people be able to buy songs off of the Podsafe Music Network?  And: What services will be offered via the Podcast Delivery Network?  Can podcasters, who have video blogs, upload their content to a directory and then set the price of what they want to sell their content for?

I’m curious about these new services that are coming in the near future.  From what I’ve been hearing and reading on the Web, it looks like an entire revolution of online content is about to flood the Internet.  Between   Google video and the iTunes store, people have a choice of buying lots of video content online (I just saw a few days ago that you can now purchase, for $1.99 an episode, South Park shows.  Nice!). 

I agree that it’s exciting to see content for sale, but what will happen when mom & pop and everyone else online puts up their videos for sale?  Will they sell?  Won’t they?  What will the quality be like?  What type of video will you be able to buy?  From the information that I can see on the Podsafe Music Network, I’m overwhelmed with the thousands of songs available at a podcaster’s fingertips.  There’s tons of songs for me to be able to use in any podcast I put together.  Last week I used Brother Love’s “Summertime” song in my episode 4b of   The Magic Sock.  I reported the use of the mp3 through the Podsafe Music Network and I’m pretty impressed with how it all works.  However, I do have a lot to learn.  I’m still torn between the great audio quality of recording podcasts with Castblaster and the not so great quality I’m obtaining when using Camtasia.

There’s a lot of innovation happening on the web and I’m trying to keep up with experimenting with new technology, but I haven’t had much free time.  Still considering that I have put out four episodes of The Magic Sock, one audio podcast for The Magic Sock, and a video of “how to subscribe to podcasts using iTunes,” that’s not half bad.  I have a long way to go in learning about conversion of files, hosting of files, and the like.  I’m also interested in Bit Torrent technology that would allow for the downloading of files outside of my web hosting server. 

I’m trying to remain plugged in so I can keep up with what’s going on in the podcast industry.  I am interested and have put together some shows so I am getting my hands dirty in all this: I’m stumbling along with the rest of people out there on how to pull of this together.  I’ll continue listening, learning and experimenting as best I can. It’s an exciting time to see such changes happening in content that can be provided by people throughout the world.  Will any of this be around in a few years?  Who knows!  Still, it’s fun to help in the experiment and to learn about what works, what doesn’t, and what people want to see/listen to.

In other news, I’ve been partly troubled by the news that   Google has agreed to censor some of the results from users of its Chinese search engine.  Google has also agreed to not offer gmail and blog services to those living in China as per the Chinese government.  I must admit that it is disturbing that the world’s largest country still restricts the information that its people can obtain and can cause a company with a net worth in the billions to listen to its requests.  Google defended their actions stating that they also limit Nazi searches from France and German versions of their search engines as well as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) illegal searches here in the United States.  But if you read between the lines, I believe the message that Google is giving to the world is: “There’s a billion Chinese over there and we want to continue to make money so we’ll go along with this.”  I don’t get the sense that the Goggle motto “Do no evil” is being ignored—I just think that Google is overlooking the censorship so that their shareholders will be happy.  Google, with its growing market share and clout, can play hardball with the Chinese.  With 1 billion potential customers, there might only be a little over 110,000,000 Chinese online now but what about 5-10 years from now?  There’s a great business opportunity for Google behind the Great Wall and I think they realize that they’re not in the business to save the Chinese people.  I recently   read a quote in which John Palfrey, author of a study on Chinese Internet censorship and a law professor at Harvard Law School, said: "There is no question. Google would tell you that going into China is about making money, not bringing democracy." That about hits the nail on the head.  Google is a business and that’s what they do. 

I’m disturbed that the Chinese government continues to censor information from its people.  I’m not naïve enough to think that similar censoring doesn’t happen in other countries (or even here in the US), but I do wonder what the Chinese youth are thinking.  Are they frustrated about the limited amount of information they can obtain?  Do they not care?  I’m just curious. 

We live an ever changing world with technology pushing forward the boundaries as to what we can see, listen to, and experience.  Sure, it’s not the same thing as being there, but watching something online is the next best thing.  With Google Video about to be rolled out along with the Podsafe Music Network content (available for sale soon), that’s a lot of content!  Yet even with all this positive news, there’s still the somber reality that even Internet giant Google bows to the power of political pressure.

Episode 5: How to Subscribe to a Podcast with iTunes

To help people learn how to subscribe to podcasts using iTunes, I put together an educational video that you can listen and watch.  Enjoy!

Download the video blog in 640x480 avi format using Windows Media player to watch (22.5 MB)

Download the video blog in 320x240 MPEG-4 format that can be played in   Quicktime or on an iPod (17.7 MB)

Total running time: 12 minutes and 8 seconds.

Show Notes:

--How to search for a podcast in iTunes
--How to subscribe to a podcast
--How to copy a podcast episode to your iPod
--How to take a   RSS feed and use it to subscribe to a podcast using iTunes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Editor's Note: Quicktime will allow you to play the 320 x 240 .m4v file.

Books

I finished reading “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez this morning on the way to work. At only 115 pages, the novella was an easy read. I rushed its reading in some parts, losing the plot somewhat, but c’est la vie. I remember reading Marquez’s “One Hundreds Years of Solitude” back when I was still in college and how moved I was to read that so many years had past and so many characters had died and been born only to be part of a great circle of events. Time went by, people’s names had changed, but they acted just as their ancestors did. How lonely the novel felt in its presence. I can still remember getting up from my twin bed at my family’s house and putting the book down. It weighed heavily in my hand. I had rushed through it and a somber feeling passed over me. After all the living, dying, struggling, fighting, and loving, the circle of life kept going on—without learning from the past.

I did not ready any of Gabriel Garcia’s Marquez’s books for some time until a few years ago. A coworker had suggested that I read Love in the Time of Cholera. I truly enjoyed the book. It was one of those books that I just became a piece of me. An emotional response awoke inside and I identified with the book on a personal level. It was not the environment or the characters that I took to but the expression and longings of love that I could relate to. An immensely powerful book.

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” is a simplistic book on the surface: A old man turning 90 years old wishes to sleep with a virgin before he dies. He’s paid for prostitutes for his whole life and in the course of 115 pages he falls deeply in love for a young girl of 14. What I found touching about the book is the man’s longing for touch, compassion, and love. He’s not looking for sex, but for love. And although the story sounds perverted (a 14 year old with a 90 year old man), the process of his falling in love with a young girl appears to me to be symbolic of his maturing into love for womanhood. He falls in love with the ideal of love, longing to be caught up in the woe/angst of the emotion. His whole life is filled with responsibility, unattachments, and carefully selected and divided portions of his life through which he can control what he experiences. But when he allows himself to open and love, his world turns upside down and for the first time in his life he allows himself to let go and love. As strange as the premise of the story is, anyone who has longed to be with another or missed the touch of another will be able to relate with the real hurt of the old man’s longing. And the message: That no matter how old you are, it is not too late to love, it a powerful message. Of course our Western sensitivities are worried about the young girl being only 14 years of age, but I took the novella to be more of an allegory. I didn’t take the book so literally but rather a message of love. Love before you die because then it’ll be too late. Very true.

In other news, I spoke with the editor of a Magic magazine today and am hoping that my article will be published in the near future. The most recent issue filled up too quickly and an advertisement took the spot on which my article would have appeared. Will my article be published? We shall see. I sure hope so.

Not much else to talk about. It’s been a long day. Take care.