Food, Real Heroes, Diversity in Comics, Movie Trailers, Net Neutrality, and some Randomness

It was a busy weekend. One that probably should have been busier, as I still didn’t get everything accomplished that I wanted to. Almost caught up now… almost.

My college and my home town have both made the feed recently. The first for being named “geekiest” by (DC) local nerd mecca Think Geek. The second for being the host of a full on rave-type festival this coming weekend. That second one is kind of surreal… as that’s exactly the sort of thing that would have never even been considered before the performing arts center on the Woodstock site (Bethel Woods) was put in place by a “local boy who done good” (by making a few million dollars in the cable TV industry (he sold his local empire to Time Warner over a decade or so ago).

More important news has come up, of course. There’s still the ongoing net neutrality fight. But the FCC is also dealing with a spectrum auction for wireless space. It’s going to be all former TV broadcast spectrum–so it can mostly make it through concrete buildings–and is reported to open the door for better cell service because of it. The words “super wifi” were also thrown around in a few articles. Very interesting, indeed.

And, returning a little to geeky news, the new trailer for Marvel’s next blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy, dropped today. I think it’s looking pretty amazing. Every time I see something new about this film, I love it more. It’s going to have an full on action/comedy feel and (director) James Gunn is looking like he’s pulled it off perfectly. That’s not much of a surprise. The man has a great grasp of genre and how to twist it just right to add the perfect amount of humor (check out Slither to see what he did with horror and Google PG Porn to see what happened when he took all the sex out of porn film ideas).

There’s also a new version of Dungeons & Dragons on the way in July. It’ll be the fifth edition. I played about one and a half sessions of 2nd Edition AD&D in college (before we abandoned it for Cyberpunk and RIFTS) and a handful of sessions of 3.5 a few years back when a friend was running a custom world setting using those rules. I’ve dabbled in it a little (as the OGL) while looking at some other game settings, and I can firmly say I’ve never cared much for the D&D system. So I’m thoroughly unimpressed that we’re getting a new version (priced at about $50 per core rule book, at that!).

In the past few years, I’ve checked out over a dozen different role playing systems and I’ve liked most of them better than D&D. Of course, I’m more story and character oriented than a lot of the classic D&D stuff seems to be… and I’ve never been interested in fully optimizing a character to just kick ass like a lot of people I know who played D&D seem to (at least once upon a time) be into. I like flaws in characters and games where combat doesn’t necessarily happen every session.

Ah, well… guess we’ll see how that all plays out. I expect some mighty nerd rage (just like when 4th edition came out).

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