I just got back from a business trip where we took a customer down to Key West, Florida. I’m not much of an outdoorsman, but we had an event where we went deep sea fishing.
I caught a 45″ barracuda – the first mate said it was one of the biggest catches he’s seen in a few years. I also learned I really enjoy jet skiing. Fun trip!
SF Signal, the most recent Hugo award winning fanzine, posted a meme on Saturday with a “last” theme. Here we go:
If you’re not reading SFSignal, you should be – it’s worth it for the daily round-up of links to discounted and free eBooks alone. There is a very good reason they won the Hugo for best Fanzine this year.
I’m cleaning up some open tabs and a story of interest to me is related to the 1999 game Homeworld from Relic Entertainment.
Relic Entertainment was bought by THQ in 2004 and THQ went bankrupt this year, auctioning off a lot of old assets, Homeworld included. Six months ago TeamPixel, a small studio, started a Kickstarter campaign to gather support to try and win the rights to Homeworld from the bankruptcy court. TeamPixel had a goal to bring Homeworld to iOS and Android as well as creating Homeworld 3 for Mac, Windows and Linux.
Homeworld was extremely innovative for its time. Featuring large space battles in three dimensions (and ships you lost didn’t go with you to the next mission), a great storyline and an active mod community, there was nothing else like it.
The auction and Kickstarter had some buzz – after I tweeted that I supported the Kickstarter, I was surprised how many replies I received with other people showing interest in it as well.
TeamPixel did not win the auction for the rights in bankruptcy court. It was later revealed that Gearbox, a studio known more for first person shooters including Borderlands, Brothers in Arms, finishing Duke Nukem Forever and Counter-Strike did.
Back in August, Gearbox shared their plans for Homeworld in their developer blog, Inside the Box. They plan to re-release Homeworld and Homeworld 2 for digital release (I’m guessing Steam) updating it to use the latest PC hardware.
The blog post is great – Brian Burleson shares his excitement in winning the auction and some of the challenges ahead in bringing Homeworld to modern technology:
When all the paperwork cleared and the source code was delivered we finally were able to unwrap what had eluded us for so long only to find that… the bike had one pedal, needed a new chain and overall was just missing parts. Granted, we knew this bike was 10-15 years old and hadn’t been touched by the original owner in quite some time, but still!
That’s when the real work started, and boy howdy, did all of those people who reached out to us at the beginning come in handy!
Over the course of a couple of months we were able to find the missing pieces and started to get the bike, erm, game, working again. (I’ll drop the bike metaphor now.)
As Martel mentioned during our panel at PAX Australia, it’s been a struggle to get all of the original tools working again. Just for comparison, the source drop we got from the purchase of the Homeworld property was 16.8 gigs. The sum of all the additional missing source we got from friends who had worked on the games originally was about 39 gigs. The two have almost zero overlap!
For example, Homeworld 2 was largely developed in a heavily customized version Maya 3. (Something we still haven’t located.) This means that if we wanted to update Homeworld 2 content for an HD version, we needed to turn to different tools.
Give the whole thing a read. Here’s to hoping Gearbox is successful and can bring this back cross-platform as well – I’d love to play Homeworld again on my Mac!
Summer is the slow time for new music releases and August saw a number of great new releases, with even more coming later this fall.
Here’s some of the new releases I picked up on vinyl in August:
Since I turned 40 earlier this year, it was time my mid-life crisis kicked in.
Ok, that’s not true – two years ago my wife and I each set some goals, with the reward of getting a tattoo. She set a running goal (I don’t remember how many miles she had to run over the course of the year) and my goal was to get under 200 pounds. In just over 2 years, I’ve lost 40 pounds, and that was mostly stopping and starting running and working out. I lost about 20 pounds that way and got more serious about it this summer and have been consistently watching my diet, working out, biking, and running and have been under 200 pounds now for about 6 weeks. I still have 15 more pounds to go, but I’m getting there.
A friend who has had a lot of work done recommended Electric Dragonland in Hopkins, MN. I finally worked up the courage to call and make an appointment for a consultation – and of course they had an opening that day. I got lucky as they’re usually a few months booked out and Damion did a great job:
If you’re not familiar with the symbol, it’s a 45 adapter for a turntable. A little bigger than I had planned, but I’m very happy with how it turned out. My backup tattoo was the Pearl Jam stick man from their first single, Alive. Coincidentally, Gimme Noise had an article yesterday with the writer talking about his first and only tattoo – the Pearl Jam stick man.
One of the albums I’ve been looking forward to the most this year is finally out today. The Bones of What You Believe In by the Glasgow band Chvrches has had singles released all summer long and the wait has been killing me. I’m only half way through my first listen on Rdio and it’s everything I wanted and more.
UPS will be delivering my vinyl copy later today and I can’t wait to give it a spin.
Chvrches recently played First Avenue here in Minneapolis. City Pages’ Gimme Noise blog did an interview and recapped the concert (complete with a Prince cover!)- those who were there swear it will be the last time you’ll be able to see the band in such in intimate setting as they are going to break big.
[https://rd.io/i/QAAKPnfubg/]
Via BoingBoing and The Guardian:
GOP and Democratic Congressmen have been denied information from the House Intelligence Committee on details of NSA spying. When they ask for information on how the Committee voted, the Committee won’t tell them the details of the vote or how other House members voted. It is supposedly “classified”. These Congressmen are being asked to vote on continuing to fund NSA operations and can’t even get the information they need to make a vote based on the facts.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
I vividly remember reading Omni Magazine growing up, both in my local library and my high school’s library. The mix of science writing and science fiction stories were fantastical and helped shape me for years to come. It was there I first encountered the writing of George R.R. Martin with his story Sandkings and other authors I would read as an adult.
Glenn Fleishman wrote recently at Boing Boing about who owns the copyrights of the former magazine:
Weintraub believes she has as good an explanation for Omni’s limbo as anyone: General Media never owned it, she said. To her knowledge, it was privately owned by Keeton and Guccione. As far as she knows, and I have found no contradiction, the various rights to the magazine would have been transferred to some creditor of Guccione’s — but it’s possible the creditor didn’t even realize that it had obtained these rights. And, in any case, those rights only seemingly include the work-for-hire pieces.
No party has appeared to ask the Internet Archive or Omni Magazine Online to take down any material. The authors and artists whose work appeared in the publication and which is available through the Internet Archive could ostensibly assert a right, but it would require substantial documentation to qualify under the DMCA since no party asserts ownership to Omni as a collective work.
Mr. Fleishman’s article is also a fascinating recap of the rise and fall of the magazine. Today, Mr. Fleishman breaks the news that Jeremy Frommer, whom we learned in the first article bought a storage locker with the production archives in Omni, is planning on relaunching Omni next week as Omni Reboot.
He is also interested in reissuing Omni’s far-ahead-of-its-time comics collections, and has been talking to the artists who appeared in the three editions produced. If he can get the rights worked out, he may republish those and then commission a fourth book along the same lines.
The best news, however, isn’t about the past, but about next week. Omni Reboot is a new publication, edited by Claire L. Evans, a writer and artist. It goes live next week. Frommer says they have hired writers and artists to bring what he calls the “Omni vibe” to 2013, and they want fresh blood, not just established practitioners. To all happy mutants, Frommer says, come aboard. “Those visionary writers who believe in that Omni vibe, they should reach out to me.”
The site is just a placeholder until next week, but I know I can’t wait and will be frequently refreshing the page.
Old issues of OMNI at the Brownell Library by Rob Friesel under a CC-BY-NA license.
Last weekend, my wife had a craving for pretzels. No, she’s not pregnant, she just loves pretzels. We’re talking the big, huge soft pretzels covered in salt. She wanted them badly enough that she even asked if the Twins were in town – and she doesn’t like baseball. We were also looking up to see if there were any places in the Twin Cities known for their pretzels, but didn’t find much outside of a couple mall restaurants, and we weren’t feeling that brave.
As I’ve dived into cooking over the last year, one of the best things I’ve found to help teach me to cook has been Hilah Cooking, a website and Youtube channel hosted by Hilah Johnson for beginner to intermediate cooks. I’ve bought her cookbook and watched countless videos teaching me a ton of things I didn’t know, especially about how to cook, not just what to cook. These include how to season a cast iron skillet, smoke points of oil, and more. Some of these things may be basic to those who have been cooking a while, but I’ve never had anyone really show me these things, and learning them has been invaluable.
The best part about both Hilah’s writing and Youtube channel is her humor. I enjoy it and it makes it much more fun to watch than a dry cooking show on some cable channel. Also, being on Youtube, I can just grab my iPad and re-watch the episode while I cook, which is so helpful.
By chance, Hilah posted a soft pretzel recipe two days ago. The timing couldn’t have been better with my wife’s cravings, so I ran out to the store yesterday and picked up some yeast and bread flour. The recipe is very simple and the pretzels turned out great. They took a little longer to cook then the recipe calls for and they’re not as dark brown as shown the video. I’m not sure if that’s due to the beer I used, but they tasted fantastic, which is what matters! The wife agreed and I see us making more of these in the future.
Here’s the episode from Hilah’s Youtube channel as she visits Easy Tiger in Austin, known for their pretzels and beer garden, as well as the recipe.
[//www.youtube.com/embed/gZJcNsUhnkM?list=PLia0F9Sr8Q6RCZBrAtp42oNTLnvCQTMDF]
For the last few weeks, Neil Gaiman has tweeted links to a cryptic new website that asked you to RSVP (via email) to a website, Who Haunts Neil. Yesterday, if you had sent an RSVP, you received an email with an update to this very mysterious site, with Mr. Gaiman hosting a video introducing his latest project: Wayward Manor.
Neil, in partnership with game studio The Odd Gentlemen, is launching his first game. Wayward Manor will be a puzzle / adventure hybrid and is doing a Kickstarter-like funding campaign, where you can pre-order the game at a number of different payment tiers with different rewards. It will be released first on PC & Mac, and a tablet version is planned.
If you know anything of Neil Gaiman, he has a love and personal passion in the macabre – a word he even uses to describe the game. He’s previously talked about how he loves Charles Addams and this seems to fit right in to that kind of genre.
I had the opportunity to see Neil a few weeks ago in Bloomington, MN on his book tour for The Ocean at the End of the Lane and he remains one of my favorite authors. I’m excited to see his first foray into video games.
Watch the video below hosted by Neil and his adorable English accent introducing Wayward Manor.
[//www.youtube.com/embed/WQn-napv3zo]