Ye Olde Staging Point

It's been a slow week for blogging for me. I don't have the energy to tackle anything too epic, so I'll fire off a few updates from the past week or so.

• Rumors are a-flying that Mark and his lovely wife Rachel are now the proud parents of a new baby. This has caused me to ponder what exactly would make a cool name for a baby these days. Assuming you want your child to have a supervillain-style name, you're in luck, because we've seen some pretty cool bad guy names emerge over the last decade or so.

  The trend I've noticed is that the coolest Bad Guys don't seem to have personal names so much as cool-sounding titles. The days of being an evil overlord with a name like Grondar or Brutarus are over. Consider these cool bad-guy names:

  • the various Darths of Star Wars
    
  • the Merovingian, Trainman, Architect, etc. from the Matrix films
    
  • the Last European (from a Clive Barker novel... maybe my fave bad-guy name of all time)
    
  • the Undying King (cool bad-guy name from the computer game Undying)
    
  • Vigo the Carpathian (from, uh, Ghostbusters 2)
    
  • the Mouth of Sauron, the Witch-King of Angmar, the King Under the Mountain* (Tolkien, of course)
    
  • the Gunslinger*, the Man in Black, and the Crimson King (Stephen King's Dark Tower series)

    (* technically not bad guys)

  You get the idea. So Mark and Rachel, I hope you haven't already named your child something else. If you have given him/her a normal name, you will need to rename your child something with an ominous-sounding title.

• Lately I've been feeling the call of the old NES, perhaps from listening to so many Nintendo-game-remixes at Overclocked Remix. Last night I played Ninja Gaiden 3 for a few minutes, long enough to remember how impossibly difficult it is--even in comparison to the early games in the series, which themselves set new standards for video-game difficulty. In NG3 they maintained more or less the same gameplay difficulty level as the previous two games, but decided to limit the number of continues you get. That singlehandedly turns what would be a really-cool game into a merely pretty-cool game. Bad move, Tecmo. That said, the Ninja Gaiden series still remains a personal favorite of mine.

• Last night, Michele and I watched Rashomon with Alan and Junko (and Toshi). It was excellent and prompted some good discussion, both at Alan's place and on the car ride home. I still haven't decided entirely what I think of it; I do suspect I'd need to watch it again, more carefully this time, to come to a conclusion about What It All Means. At any rate, a highly recommended film should you be so unfortunate as to have not yet seen it.

• I got a new roleplaying game this week, after hearing rave reviews of it from Jon--Hero Fifth Edition. So far I've only skimmed through it, but it looks absolutely superb. It seemed to give off a major Rolemaster vibe (which is good, since I love RM) with its focus on flexibility in character creation and consistency in game mechanics. I may offer more comments on it as I read through (which may be a while, given its bulk).

• I'm still plodding steadily through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Thus far it is a fairly interesting read--and there's no denying Stephenson's linguistic mastery--but it hasn't grabbed me like Cryptonomicon did. That said, I'm only about one-third of the way through it, and the novel itself is only one-third of a trilogy, so it'd be a bit premature to make any sort of judgment at this point.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled Friday, as I return to mine.