«

[XhArD]

My bro has decided on his next project. He has managed to score a 15" LCD Touchscreen from work for free, along with a coin validator (he works at Getronics, computer/poker machines). So what he's gonna do is build a cabinet, mount the touchscreen in it running off a 1ghz Duron or something. It'll be running Nordbeats Jukebox program, and will be coin operated. It will have 2 8 inch woofers, 2 1 inch tweeters, and 1 12 inch sub, with sound sensitive ring neons around each woofer and the sub. He has already managed to get most of the stuff for free, so all he needs to do is build the actual cabinet. It's gonna be sweet

[unholy]

i evny ur brother and his 15" touch screen

but does sound like its going to good use

[bigal]

My oldest son has basically taken over our basement. He has the guest room, and his own bathroom with tub/shower down there. I have the storage room (in the unfinished area) where my workbench is located, but I must pass through the kingdom of Tom to get there. He has taken over my pool table with Magic cards / related stuff piled up on it. I have four systems installed and running in the main basement area that we use for gaming - one of which is his. OsbornAgain now occupies the choice spot, closest to the stairs and easiest to escape from should the piles of Magic cards come crashing down around us...

[The Modfather]

Magic is so, so uh... Weak... I used to play a lot of RPG's in the day and we would laugh at those CCG's like that. Tell yer son he needs to get an imagination. I've got a stack of AD&D books for sale if yer interested.

[bigal]

You know, that brings back memories. When I was dating my wife, we played that game with a few friends. She had a friend that was a good dungeon master, and I think we played maybe 15-20 times for several hours each, exploring his world and collecting gold, killing people we found in towns, and things of this nature. This was the early 1980's. Before you could do a similar thing on-line.

By the way, we still have those books so I don't need them. Thanks for the offer though.

[The Modfather]

Hehehe, I have about 50 books here and over my friend's house where we would play we've got a collection of over 1000 books for role playing, a total of at least 100,000 dice of various shapes, sizes and colors, including some made out of semi-precious and precious stones and metals. We were VERY into it. One weekend we just all decided to stay over there and paint all the walls downstairs as maps of our gaming world. Took us many hours and lots of paint but eventually we had the whole world mapped on the walls with me doing the illustration work for borders and so forth. Often we'd play games that'd last over a year and involve many many overnighters, long weekends, or if we were on vacation often we'd just ensconce ourselves in our world, order food for delivery and play what we'd called a "roundabout" adventure, which meant that every 3 hours the dungeonmaster would switch, to give the other guys each a chance to play and not have to keep thinking of ways to continue the adventure. When it was your turn you'd shrink to the size of an action figure and one of the players would carry you around in their pouch or pocket.

God, my brain starts to seize up when I think of the mounds of paper with characters, stats, items and so forth I have in bookbags all over the city here.

[bigal]

...we would go to her friends house and play for 2-3 hours max. By then I was tired and it was time to go home and fool around. Those were the days - before the kids arrived.

[The Modfather]

Yeah, I'm talking about back before I had any responsibilites or anything like that, just time to goof off and be a fool. We'd play stuff other than AD&D of course, Marvel Super Heroes RPG, Champions, BattleTech, Vampire the Masquerade when it came out for a little while and stuff like that. Eventually we just morphed stuff into our own set of rules using all the various RPGs for sources and sort of freestyled it. Lots of fun.

Now-a-days it's all on computers and even though I did try to recapture some of that fun back in the early 90's by designing a MUD (www.medievia.com) it never was anything near the same. Now, these MMORPG's that people are so into, to me they're boring as hell. Letting the computer do all the fun stuff and forcing you to take care of the crap that nobody ever liked about RPG's in the first place. I see 'em as a step bacwards.

[bigal]

"A large swarm of fae crabs has been spotted on the ocean at 1884 by 1432."

Hey, that scroll is pretty neat. I quickly grabbed a headline before it went by, and I was wondering how on earth would you deal with the fae crabs. I guess in today's world I'd nuke them. Better to throw everything you got at the crabs, lest their friends the lobsters come up and do battle with you...

[The Modfather]

Man, don't as me, I haven't been involved in that thing in over a decade. You can blame my old buddy Mike Krause for all that's happened since the early 90's. If you do a Wikipedia search on Medievia you'll find me in there though.

That place is just getting weirder by the moment though.