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(From "Man'O'Mars" number 1, 1953.)
Comments Off on RP: Set queer tube to purple!
Posted in Daily Random Panel
I have just uploaded a fairly major change to the way HeroMachine 3 handles saving and loading characters, and how it masks and layers items. Details after the jump, but the take-away is that going forward you should have a lot fewer problems loading and saving. And hopefully the "stuck item" bug will go away too.
All of your previously saved characters should still be there, so you won't lose anything. It all ought to just work better.
I also want to give a special shout-out to everyone who contributed in the last thread on this subject, you all helped a lot. Particular thanks go to Violet, who sent me her saved-character .sol file, and Panner, who gave some exceptionally helpful, detailed, and specific bug reports that were incredibly helpful for tracking down all this. Thanks a ton!
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Posted in HeroMachine 3, News & Updates
(From "Man'O'Mars" number 1, 1953.)
Comments Off on RP: Enter … the Legion of Wimps!
Posted in Daily Random Panel
HeroMachine is all about making cool looking characters in even cooler looking costumes, so I thought it would be appropriate for us to talk about which iconic characters do the duds the best:
Deciding who should be on this list was tough. I felt like the character had to have achieved a certain level of awareness in the general cultural consciousness. A devastatingly awesome costume worn by a one-off character in a third-tier comic isn't going to make the grade to be considered one of the greats.
Second, I felt like the costume should say something about who the character is, or what their powers are, or what they stand for, or something about the general universe and publishing house they inhabit, or even all of the above. As someone who put together a similar list a few years ago said, you ought to be able to hand someone who knows virtually nothing about comics a list of character names and a list of pictures, and they should be able to put them together.
Finally, and this is much more nebulous, they have to look good.
And with that, we're off!
Comments Off on Poll Position: The Greatest Super-Hero Costume EVER?!
Posted in Versus
(From "Space Action" number 1, 1952.)
Comments Off on RP: 1990s comics recruitment ads
Posted in Daily Random Panel
With hearty thanks once again to Glenn3's "Say What? Pictures", your challenge this week is to come up with the best replacement dialog for this comics panel:
I love this panel. Why is Captain Triumph flying away from a burning building? Or is it filled with some other noxious substance, perhaps left on purpose by our jodhpur-wearing friend (I put the over-under on fart jokes this week at 17)? I can't wait to see what you all come up with! The best entry (as judged by yours truly) wins the author's choice of either any item they like or any portrait to be included in HeroMachine 3′s final release, or a custom black and white “Sketch of the Day” style illustration (you pick the subject, I draw it however I like)!
All entries must be left as a comment (or comments) to this post. Keep ‘em clean (appropriate for a late-night broadcast TV show), but most importantly, keep ‘em funny!
No limit on the number of submissions beyond normal self-editing (i.e. don’t spam crappy entries hoping to get lucky), so good luck to everyone. Contest closes next Monday.
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Posted in Caption Challenges, Challenges
Many thanks to everyone who entered Character Contest 57: Aquarius! I've picked out some of the best of them (in my personal opinion, of course) below, and at the end I'll announce which of them is the overall winner.
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Posted in Challenge Favorites, Challenges, Character Design Challenges
(From "Space Action" number 1, 1952.)
Comments Off on RP: It appears to be an open window and some sort of sorority house …
Posted in Daily Random Panel
(From "Space Action" number 1, 1952.)
Comments Off on RP: Wait, the stratosphere has corners?
Posted in Daily Random Panel
OK, this is a little bit of a cheap post, but I can't resist -- bona fide big time online magazine Slate has an article up on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books! This opening paragraph pretty much nails why I liked them growing up:
Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, which required friends; or computer games, which required your parents to spend a lot of money; or arcade games, which required your sister to drive you to the mall, Choose Your Own Adventure books cost $1.75, and you could read them on your own.
The best part was the cheating. Oh Lord, how I cheated. Holding my place, flipping forward to see what would happen, then flipping back and taking the alternate if I didn't like it. Randomly opening the book and going from wherever I landed. Starting from the ending and working my way backwards. It didn't matter that the only person I was "cheating" was me; that was part of the fun. Little did I know I was actually already accounted for:
From the start, the books were full of innovative page hacks. Readers would be trapped in the occasional time loop, forced to flip back and forth between two pages. Most memorable was Inside UFO 54-40, a book in which the most desired outcome, discovering the Planet Ultima, could only be achieved by readers who cheated and flipped through the book until they reached the page on their own. At that point, the book congratulated the reader for breaking the rules.
My biggest problem was finding the darn things. Mega-bookstores weren't around back then -- at least, not beyond the Waldenbooks in the mall, and that was 45 minutes away -- so I had to make do with the two or three adventures I'd scrounged up.
I do recall getting frustrated because there were so many other things I would've done, but they wouldn't give me the choice. Like in our latest adventure -- how about jumping onto the spider claws, climbing into the robot cleanup droid, and commandeering it? This is why I had to move on to RPGs ultimately -- not enough scope for my deviant mind.
The problem with RPGs, of course, was that you had to have other people to play them, and all too often other people who like RPGs were in short supply. I think that's what makes computer RPGs so popular -- they offer a much wider scope of action than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" types of books (though always less than face-to-face pen and paper RPGs), and you can play them alone if you need to.
I have to say, though, I might've changed my mind had I been reading Montgomery instead of Packard:
While Packard was writing the standard sword-and-sorcery story The Forbidden Castle about dragons, knights, and princesses, Montgomery unleashed the berserk House of Danger which involved super-intelligent monkeys plotting to destabilize the world economy via counterfeiting, psychic detectives, Civil War ghosts, alien abduction, holograms, age regression, cannibalism, secret environmental conspiracies, and one ending that has the reader turned into Genghis Khan.
Clearly, I backed the wrong horse!
Comments Off on Slate likes what I like!
Posted in Things I Like
Three middle-aged nerds (including yours truly!) review all of the MCU movies in chronological order. Short, funny, and full of good vibes, check it out and let us know what you think!
Nerdmudgeon.com