Häxan

Check out these Criterion Collection screen caps from Häxan:

Time for me to watch this again. It's available on Hulu Plus

How many Shire sausages are in a hobbit slam?

You will be thrilled to hear that Denny's will be introducing a Hobbit-themed menu:

Menu items include 11 breakfast, lunch and dinner items such as "Hobbit Hole Breakfast," "Frodo's Pot Roast Skillet," "Gandalf's Gobble Melt" and the "Build Your Own Hobbit Slam," which includes limited-time items such as "Shire Sausage." Fans of the Hobbit knows that hobbits eat two breakfasts, and eat about seven times per day. "We just felt with the two breakfasts that whole notion of comfort eating and comfort food" were a fit for Denny's, said Frances Allen, CMO at the restaurant chain.

gygaxmemorialfund.org GONE!

The Gygax Memorial Fund website is down. I'm assuming this is a temporary technical glitch, but if anyone reading this knows anyone associated with the fund, please let them know. Also, tell them to point the whois technical email address record somewhere not on the same domain.

UPDATE The Gygax Memorial Fund people are aware of the problem, and they're trying to fix it.

UPDATE Five or so days later, the site is back.

Play D&D, get a job at Google

From the recent Google datacenter tour:

Denise discovered her Google job in a unique way. “It was through playing Dungeons and Dragons,” she says. While playing the game, she met a Google employee and discussed future work plans. “I had originally planned to get a degree in literature, but later changed my major to Computer Science,” she says. After graduating, she applied to our data center in The Dalles, Oregon, where she now works as part of a 150-person team.

Miniature Monday

Misc. links (megadungeons and game design)

According to naraoia at The Mule Abides, "the OSR’s love affair with the megadungeon seems to be over." Stephan Poag of Aldeboran adds: "After a brief period of recently being 'in vogue' among the cognicenti of the OSR community, it seems as though the 'megadungeon' may be once again falling out of favor."

So megadungeons aren't fun now? Hmph. Where is this discussion happening?

Daniel Cook is a video game designer. Check out his posts on building tight game systems, loops and arcs, and arrow of play.

UPDATE: Joseph Browning of Sorcergy & Super Science also posted on the megadungeon kerfuffle, which looks less like some popular turn of sentiment against megadungeons, and more like Joe The Lawyer not finding the first level of Dimmermound cinematic enough for his tastes. Ahem.

Miniature Monday

The greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself

The always interesting Smithsonian Past Imperfect blog offers up a nice little D&D-ish story of ancient myth and amateur archeology:

But only when the men went deeper into the hillside did the greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself. There, hidden at the bottom of a much steeper passage, and behind a second S-bend that prevented anyone approaching from seeing it until the final moment, ran an underground stream. A small “landing stage” projected out into the sulfurous waters, which ran from left to right across the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in places it approached boiling point.

Index of Dragon articles

The Acaeum wiki has a useful listing of Dragon issues and articles. I'll probably spend a bit of time in the coming weeks with my CD-ROM collection and the Best of Dragon index.

Go First dice

Behold the Go First dice, which are fair four-way initiative dice that never result in a tie. They're 12-siders numbered:

Die 1: 1, 8, 11, 14, 19, 22, 27, 30, 35, 38, 41, 48
Die 2: 2, 7, 10, 15, 18, 23, 26, 31, 34, 39, 42, 47
Die 3: 3, 6, 12, 13, 17, 24, 25, 32, 36, 37, 43, 46
Die 4: 4, 5, 9, 16, 20, 21, 28, 29, 33, 40, 44, 45

Neat. The dice are for sale now.

It looks like the same guy has a dice die:

Miniature Monday