The Sentinel of Libation

I'm SO excited because two movies with two of my favorite characters are coming out this summer...

therefore a mashup is in order... ...CAPTAIN CONAN!


Yeah it's already been done...

A long time ago...

...in the 1980s


-Swinebread

The passing of one of the Greats... Gene Colan 1926 – 2011

Happy Fathers Day

-Swinebread

Comic Acquisitions 6-12-11

-Swinebread

"the class of 1967, which is growing reflexively hostile to government spending, needs to realize the interest it shares with the class of 2011: Unless today’s young people ascend into well-paying jobs, it won’t be possible to finance Social Security and Medicare for tomorrow’s seniors"

Link

-Swinebread

Top Ten TV Cartoons (plus Three Honorable Mentions)

-Swinebread

Wanna Get It Out of Your Head?

Q Lazarus' Goodbye Horses will forever be associated with the Buffalo Bill scene from the Silence of the Lambs but how do you experience this wonderful song on it's own terms?

First you must attach it to a video of a totally different nature to blow away your preconceived notions...

watch this and I'll see you on the other side:





Now go on and just listen... here


-Swinebread

Crappy Comics in My Collection

-swinebread

Recent Comic Buys

Post 2

Swinebread's Vlog Post

Long Time No See

Haven't Been Blogging but I thought I'd give a heads up on what I'm Reading right now.

Vietnamerica



swinebread

It's so obvious it is funny!

-Swinebread

R.I.P Harvey Pekar

The great master of the autobiographical comic is gone... See Here


Harvey Pekar

October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010





-Swinebread

Great Moments in Comic Book History

HULK SMASH... GIANT WILLY!


-Swinebread

Random Comic Cover

-Swinebread

Happy Birthday Lincoln

-Swinebread

Tomb of Horrors!

Any old-school D&D player could tell you about Gary Gygax's infamous meat grinder adventure module "Tomb of Horrors." The module exemplified everything that was great about old school D&D: an emphasis on roleplaying, a sense of dread that your beloved character would meet it's maker and perhaps most importantly an emphasis on actual puzzle solving rather than rolling dice.

It's no surprise that gamers talk about that module in reverential terms. Surviving the module was a badge of honor among those that played early editions of D&D. It was almost certain you would most, if not all of your party, before you got halfway through the adventure.

So it was with no small bit of surprise that I read today that Wizards of the Coast is releasing an updated version of the module for 4th edition D&D. I'm pretty disappointed with this announcement.

Terabytes of data have been expended in debating the merits of the most recent version of D&D, so I have no interest of hashing that out here. I personally find the emphasis on character balance and dumbing-down of game mechanics to be off-putting. I can't shake the feeling when I play 4th edition games that I've played this game before online when it was called World of Warcraft.

Tank + Blaster + Wizard + Healer for the win = teh boring.

The prospect that you can take a module that contains only one monster but tons and tons of clever traps instead and translate it into the 4th edition rules with it's emphasis on fighting, player survival and rolling dice rather than roleplaying seems highly dubious to me. They're going to have to nerf the damned thing and if they do that they're entirely missing the point.

--Dean Wormer
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Been Readin'

Well a lot of time has passed and the holidays... WHEW!

Everything went OK with the move except for the usual annoying stuff (like not having heat for four days).

The funny thing is I'm not hooked up to the internet at home and I don't have a have a TV right now so I've been reading quite a bit.

Happy New Year!

New Year's Greetings from Swine and and the gang! Just a short post to say:

May all your wishes come true, and Good Luck follow you!

Now go here to watch the ball drop in New York!

This one got to me

Hi everybody, last week I was perusing the Huffington Post ‘s Impact section when I came across Lucia Duran’s story and it really struck a cord with me and so I decided to donate a few dollars to help her out. This charity drive is part of the 12 families, 12 cities, and 12 days that the Huffington Post is running to raise modest sums for various families in need this holiday season.

Lucia’s story of recovery from various periods of domestic violence and her will to strive for a better life for herself and her kids just broke my heart.

After reading the article last week on Christmas Eve, just couldn’t get her son’s picture out of my mind. He’s so young and yet he has already had to deal with such awful problems. I have to say that I have been, well, haunted by his intense, yet hopeful face, but why? I guess I saw both my son and myself together in his expression. This is something heavy that I haven’t quite worked out but it has knocked me for loop. So I sent a few bucks. It would be so great if the cycle of violence ended with Lucia’s son, Juan Pablo and her daughter, Fatima.

All the families that the Huffington Post is highlighting are very deserving, but I felt I just had to bring more attention to this one story. So if you have a few dollars to spare and still feel a little more holiday spirit, take the plunge and donate to a lady that is really trying to pick herself and her children up by the bootstraps.

I read the article, and I just wasn’t the same

The 12 families, 12 cities, and 12 days event ends on the 1st of January so there is only three days left. There is still time to a little that can make a big difference.

Lucia and her kids have received a lot help from the Homeless Prenatal Program and they're worth checking out too.

Thanks

Happy New Year everyone


-Swinebread

Geektastic Holidays Ahoy!

Wormer here.

Lots of geek stuff happening for me personally. In no particular order of importance---


Swiney lent me trades of the entire Preacher series because he loves it and probably because I'm such a fan of Garth Ennis' "Battlefields" series.

I've read through the first three and "Ancient History" which covers the backstory of some of the secondary characters and I have to say I love it. It's a weird combination of things that Ennis mixes into his tale but it happens to be stuff that's right up my alley: westerns, Catholic theology (I'm a reformed Catholic,) vampires and such. There's also a faint subtext of Douglas Adams in much of the dark humor mixed into the story. Great stuff.



I got rid of my comics box a couple of months ago but picked up a ton of comics for the kid's stockings as I do every year. One of the titles was "The Marvel Zombies Return."

The original Marvel Zombies is a darkly hysterical take on an alternative universe where an infected superhero comes to earth, quickly turns the Marvel Zombies into the undead and they, in turn, eat everybody on earth in a matter of hours. Unfortunately the mini-series that followed this brilliant debut didn't quite measure up in terms of creativity with the zombie Spiderman and company conquering their hunger, becoming vegetarians and essentially nerfing the harder edge that had made the title stand out.

MZR has the series back to form. The zombies have been cast to other alternative realities where they suddenly regain their hunger and go all all you can eat buffet again. The first title has Spiderman falling into his own storyline from the 70's and trying to be a hero but winding up eating each and every archvillain that ever faced him, ultimately causing the plague all over again.



In my own Christmas Stocking were copies of the Weird War 2 expansion for the Savage Worlds rpg, the "Temeraire" series of books which Peter Jackson is going to make into a television series and Left For Dead 2 for the PC which will suck up some of my time when I get a chance.



I've played video games since I was a kid with a penchant for computer games. This means I literally have decades of experience tweaking settings, loading floppies, updating drivers or whatever the hell I have to do to make a particular bit of gaming software work.

At the top of my son's Christmas list was a game called "Section 8." It's a 3-D shooter set in the future, sort of a mix of Battlefront and Halo. He was especially excited to unwrap the thing.

What followed was about three days of hell as I struggled to get this software running. It will come as no surprise that Microsoft is the publisher of this monstrosity. Much of the problem can be traced to Microsoft's DRM scheme. They require an internet connection to their Windows Live gaming network even if you're playing single player. Naturally this didn't work and the game would crash every time it tried to connect.

After searching the net I found that we weren't alone in facing this problem and that many, many people who had bought the game had struggled with the same issue. Complicating this was the fact there was no one solution but a mix of removing and reinstalling Games for Windows and removing and installing Section 8 seemed to be what resolved the problem for most people.

The only reason I can assume that this software was released in this poor of a state has to be that Microsoft really wants to kill computer gaming so everybody that games will buy an XBox. No other theory makes sense.

--Dean Wormer
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