The Monster That Is One-Eyed Doll

I can't say I discovered One-Eyed Doll, but I was introduced to their music last year. Since then I've collected all the band's albums, except for "Something About A Dragon", and one of lead singer Kimberly Freeman's solo albums - "Sleep". For a band who has been around for nine years they flew well below my radar.

I'm not usually a heavy metal/punk listener, but I do have a wide range to my taste in music. When one of my listeners requested I play the song "Commited" while I was broadcasting live I knew this was a band I needed to check out. Kimberly and her sole band mate and producer Jason Rufuss Sewell, better known to fans as Junior, have been delivering goth/horror inspired music that is truly a pleasure to listen to. All with a sense of humor.

The music they present ranges in tone, style, and lyrics to an amazing degree for a band that generally gets labeled as goth-punk. Granted, some of the songs are somewhat weak lyrically, and simple musically, but they somehow make it all work. Kimberly's guitar work, while far from masterful, is perfect for the material they put out. Junior provides the drum work, and anything else that the studio product requires.

The first OED album "Hole" has some of my favorite songs from the band. "Nudie Bar", a song about a lonely girl who's boyfriend has been spending too much time at said establishment to the point where she decides to do something about it... with propane tanks. "Hoochie Mamma", I love the lyrics to this song:

"You think I'm easy
Cause I wear these tight pants
You think it should be easy
To get in my pants

Well it took me five minutes
To pull these things on
I can hardly breathe
Let alone be turned on"

Fact is, I like every song on Hole. Even the silly, simplistic "I Love My Little Bus" is a joy to listen to.

I could go on and talk about every album they've come out with, "Monster", "Break", "Dirty", and Kimberly's "Sleep", but each of these albums is just as good as that first one. Instead let's hit the highlights. On "Monster" we have "Be My Friend", a song about how hard it is to win friendship when you're a serial killer. "Break" doesn't have any one song that stands above the others in my opinion, but if I had to pick one one song I'd have to go with "Cinderblock", a song of a child who finally turns the tables on her abusive father by taking a cinder block to his head while he's passed out from drinking.

OK... just had to download "Something About A Dragon" off of Amazon while writing this. One of the best OED songs was missing from my collection: "Because You're A Vampire". I'm not even going to try to describe this song. Here's the official video from Youtube:



Turn off Paragon Radio Gallifrey for a few minutes and enjoy.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Next up would be Kimberly's solo album, which is really only a solo album because the music doesn't quite work as OED material. Two songs stand out for me on this album,"Learn To Fly" and "Believe In Me". Both songs display Kimberly's voice at it's best.

Last, but far from least, is "Witches", a true concept album that came about while Kimberly did some reading up on the Salem witch trials. While this album may lack the sense of humor that earlier works reveled in, it is, in my option, OED's masterpiece. Simply put, if you're only going to buy one album from OED this would be the one I'd recommend. Every song on this album is above and beyond anything else previously recorded and released by this wonderful band. Musically, lyrically, it is simply inspired.

Clue, Doctor Who-iffied.

First of all I know there is a commercially available version of this game, and I'd love to play it. I'm not doing this for any profit, nor will I be pasting it to a game board. I'm just hoping I can come up with a way to play it online with some folks in a virtual world I spend some time in.

I also know of a blog from 2013 ([How To] - Make Doctor Who Clue) where the poster did why I'm doing, sort of. I took the game board from that blog, and swapped out locations. Below is my version of the game board:

Rather than like Clue, none of the players become any of the characters. Also unlike clue, there is no weapon involved. Instead of room, murderer, and weapon, we're trying to guess which location, which companion, and, of course what villain.

I decided on nine companions and nine villains.mostly because trying to narrow down the companions down to only six would have been painful. Even with the 9 I've picked there will be those that will wonder why I picked the ones I have rather than the reader's favorite.

One person has to be involved in the game only in that they will be the only one keeping track of the actual location companion and villain combination. Let's call them the moderator. How they determine the three conditions that will determine the winner of the game is up to the moderator, but some form of random generation is advisable.

The players may start the game at any of the eight small TARDIS spaces that line the edge of the playing board. These also serve as teleports, from one TARDIS to another. To move, roll 2D6 (2 six sided dice) and move up to the total number that was rolled in any direction you wish from the square you start on. Once you are in one of the locations you always stop. At that point the player can make a guess with the location they are in and then who the companion and villain are. At the point the moderator will inform only the player guessing which of their guesses are incorrect. This will potentially narrow down the location quickly, but finding out the location and staying there to make guess after guess and like have everyone making a bee line for that location.Therefore if you start a turn in a location you must move out of it and head to another location.

Locations -
As clearly marked on the game board: Dalek City, Battle of Hastings, the United Nations HQ, the space-bound Orient Express, The Library, TARDIS control/console room, Nerva Beacon, UNIT HQ, and finally the Titanic.

Companions
Easy enough just to give visual reference for these -

Villains:
And same for these -

I Don't Need A New Laptop, But...

Wish I could afford one, and can't help but look and drool sometimes.

Today I got an email from Acer. First one I remember ever getting, which lead me to looking at laptops that which I really, really would love to be able to buy. The top of the line, no way in hell can I afford these machines start at $1500 is the Predator 15 G9-591-70VM Gaming Laptop, way too rich for my blood at the moment. Then there's the Aspire VN7-572G-53E7 Gaming Notebook, which comes with a $700 price tag, which is $100 off the regular price.

Predator 15 G9-591-70VM Dream Machine

This, of course lead me to look to see what my local Microcenter had to offer. The ASUS ROG GL551JW-DS71 15.6" Gaming Laptop looks awesome, but at $950 no way am I buy that soon. Even the "open box" available at the moment is $900. But, more in my potential budget, if my arm ever got twisted by one of my current machines dying is the Acer Aspire E5-491G-70PX 14" Laptop. It doesn't have the back lit keyboard of the gaming rigs, but otherwise looks to hold it's own against the other two machines. The $650 price is more than I have to spend,though. Lastly they have the Toshiba Satellite C75D-C7232 17.3" Laptop, with a $500 price tag. If I was actually in the market for a new machine this is probably what I'd end up with at this point.

Toshiba Satellite C75D-C7232

To put things in perspective, while I'm making significantly more than you're average McDonalds burger slinger, I'm still making less than the $15 an hour that they're asking for.

Anyone got a million dollar lottery ticket they don't need?

Halloween 2015

Paragon Reborn

I had a lot of fun tonight logging into a game I'd never thought I'd log into again... Well, that's not entirely true. After City of Heroes got shutdown, not even 2 years after I first started playing the game, we had Icon soon enough. Icon, for those unfamiliar, was a way to get into the character creator and enter the game as a stand alone. Not really into the game, just the world, really.

Paragon City using Icon is a lonely place. Sure, eventually the NPCs where brought back, which was a nice touch, but no game play, no one to role play with, or just chat. But I still used it, to create characters for my tabletop games, and some times just for the ambient noise when I have trouble sleeping. The release of Paragon Chat has changed that. No, we still can't do missions, but we can chat and role play and run a costume contest for the fun of it every now and again.

The shutdown was hard on a lot of folks. It was hard on me because I was just starting, after a year and a half as a subscriber, starting to really learn the game... and break out of my shell. I'm generally a shy person, so spent most of my time in CoH soloing. The few team situations I found myself in early on didn't work out well. And then I found Virtue...

Virtue was known as the role player's server, and I've been doing table top role playing since the early days of AD&D. It was great, I started teaming more, but then, before I got myself truly immersed into the RP community a dark cloud rolled over the city of Paragon. NCSoft announced we had 3 months to live.

With that announcement came a variety of responses. Some played more, some couldn't bare to log in, we had in game rallies, we had the last surviving developer at Paragon Studios spawning tentacles in Atlas Park. Atlas Park 33 was born, and save for a few times it crashed said Dev relaunched it for us every time.

Tentacles in Atlas Park

And I became obsessed with getting my main character to 50. Not only am I a role player, but I'm was an Altaholic as well. In just under 2 years I had generated some 200 or so characters. For me to go an entire 3 months logging in as just one character was ... well, impossible. But for 3 months Willowbright was on probably 75-90% of the time I was in game. The final week she finally broke the big 50, on a DFB of all things. I didn't even get to play any of the level 50 content, I'd hit my goal, it was time to play some of the alts I'd been neglecting.

So, tonight Willowbright was reborn, as Willow Wind. (Never did like the name Willowbright... it was just the first acceptable Willow name that I found.) Also seeing the light of day for the first time was the City of Heroes version of Timelord Tom. It was a lot of fun, chatting and listening to Leo and his crew of misfits as they were livestreaming on Youtube.

How many of my old characters will I recreate? I don't know. I didn't save all my character costumes. Wish I had. Probably a few of the ones I can remember, but then I'll probably be making new ones, too.

Saved costumes and a bit of Demo editing magic...

One thing I do want to do is a weekly Paragon Radio Gallifrey broadcast, as Timelord Tom of course. It will probably only be a couple of hours a week, as I have a pretty full schedule of real life things during much of the week, and I already do a 3 hours show Monday nights in Utherverse. I'm thinking Tuesday nights from 8pm until 10pm EST. Either that, or Saturdays in the afternoon, though weekends can cause chaos that would prevent me from doing so every now and again. Anyone else have any plans to do scheduled events?

Anyways.. it's past midnight here, and I work in the morning.

See you in Paragon City... next time we're logged into Paragon Chat at the same time. Be sure to say hi.

Wormholes and Singularities

Last week one of my older sisters (I have several) posted on Facebook about a game just about everyone has played at sometime in their lifetime, in one form or another. The original game dates back to who knows when and was developed in India. It was called Snakes and Ladders, most commonly known now as Chutes and Ladders... because obviously Snakes are just too scary for today's parents.

Reminded of this game, I decided to toss on old Snakes and Ladders board up at my Temporal Museum (Red Light Center/Utherverse - basically adults only social setting virtual world, with far too much "Adult" - aka Porn - advertising for my taste, but much easier that dealing with Second Life). Problem is, unknown to me, on of my friends in that world already had a Snakes and Ladders game up at their Rec Center.

So, I came up with a solution, a version of the game with a Science Fiction twist. While I can't believe no one else has done this, if it's out there I haven't come across it... I present to you: Wormholes and Singularities:



Rules are the same as regular old Snakes and Ladders, or Chutes and Ladders if you prefer. You start off the board, entering square # 1 using one 6 sided die to move. Instead of sliding down the snakes/chutes, you get sucked thru a black hole. Rather than climbing ladders, you shoot through wormholes.

If anyone knows of this style of board already being produced, please let me know. I'd love to see it.

Old Time Radio Broadcast

One of the wonderful things about old radio shows is that they are as enjoyable to listen to today as they were when they first broadcast. Thanks to fans of the shows recording them we have several prime examples of what our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents spent their evenings listening to in a time before television.

With that said, Paragon Radio Gallifrey is proud to announce we will be broadcasting a few select radio shows every Saturday, at 7:30 PM Easter Time in the USA. We hope you tune in and enjoy some of the best audio entertainment that Dark Fantasy, Dimension X, Mystery In The Air, and The Inner Sanctum had to offer.