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October 21, 2008 |
One of my favorite places online to buy things is from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. According to the group’s history, it was founded to support a live action role-playing game called “Cthulhu Lives”. I don’t quite know the game, but I do enjoy what the group creates.
In a nutshell, the HPLHS produces a variety of adaptations of Lovecraft’s work in a variety of media. In the film realm, they produced an adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu” and are currently working on an adaptation of “The Whisperer in the Darkness”. In the audio realm, they created three dramatic adaptations of “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Dunwich Horror”, and “The Shadow Out of Time”. The thing that makes these adaptations so interesting is not that they attempt to situate them in the modern world, rather, they create movies and radio dramas as they would have been in HPL’s own lifetime. “The Call of Cthulhu” is a black and white silent film, while a fictitious tobacco company sponsors the radio shows.
The cumulative result of these products is an “air of verisimilitude” surrounding the universe in which the HPLHS plays “Cthulhu Lives”. The nice thing about the high-quality products that they share with the rest of us is that it allows people like me to play along in our own small ways.
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October 15, 2008 |
One of the nice things about attending a conference is that things are pretty quiet once things wrap up. I have a mapping project that I’ve been keeping under wraps, and one of the components I needed was a zooming image view control that could be connected to map data servers.
After an afternoon of Objective-C hacking, I have version 0.1 of CKMapView working on Mac OS X. I plan to port it over to the iPhone once I’ve worked out the kinks, but I think that my current version that provides a zoomable view of Azeroth and the Outland is quite nifty. While I have no plans to create an iPhone atlas of the World of Warcraft, I might reassess that decision at some point in the future. ;-)
Update: The Outlands now available on your iPhone (simulator): screenshot.
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October 13, 2008 |
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, my personal weblog has returned after many months of retirement.
Some time ago, I discontinued my Vox weblog because I didn’t feel that I had a sufficient amount of interesting and important content to keep it going. I decided to focus my efforts on my projects and to let them speak for themselves. I reserved my Twitter account for my wannabe pithy thoughts.
This was a nice arrangement, but I’ve decided to bring back the blog using Tumblr as a channel for me to post the occasional nugget that is too large for Twitter. Tumblr’s microblogging format seems to be well suited for this purpose. I plan on keeping this simple and just uploading the sporadic post here and there.
I’m currently attending the ASSETS 2008 conference in lovely Halifax, Nova Scotia. I arrived a day early to get things in order and I’m looking forward to the presentations later today.
I did take the opportunity to explore the city a bit yesterday and I’m looking forward to finding a few minutes to visit The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. I was also hoping to bring a few Cuban cigars back to my humidor this trip, but that appears to be more expense and trouble than it’s worth. I don’t know if I’m ready to play smuggler quite yet.
