License plate on an Eclipse:
I♥VODKA
In California, you can get symbols on a personalized Kids License Plate (fees are donated to child safety programs)—which makes this particular choice even stranger.
Category: Entertainment
Grass Under Renovation
Irvine is a strange town.
More Targeted Advertising
While catching up with IMDB info on the various actors in Revenge of the Sith, I noticed an appropriate set of ads on Ewan McGregor’s profile:
For those who haven’t heard of it, Ewan is the male lead in The Island.
(At the moment, Natalie Portman gets a Windows XP ad, and Hayden Christensen gets… Amazon.com. I assume they’re on the standard rotation.)
Alternate title?
Spotted on a movie theater marquee:
STAR WARS EPISODE III
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Sorry, no photo, though if it’s still there the next time I drive by, I might be able to get one.
Fantasy Gaming: Good News and Bad News
I’ve started installing games on the new computer, some of which I haven’t played in over a year.
Arcanum seems to work fine, and maybe now I can actually play it. (It stopped working on the old computer, so I moved on to other games.)
Heroes of Might and Magic IV installs fine, but Game Update can’t find the server to grab patches. I assume that’s because 3DO doesn’t exist anymore. If I’d been able to just download the installers and save them locally, I’d be able to run them. So I’ve got a fully-patched copy on a computer I’m getting rid of, and I can’t install it on the new one. This is a major problem with download-on-demand software updaters.
Arcomage, the card game embedded in Might and Magic VII, which was later released stand-alone, and is a fun puzzle game to while away 15 minutes…refuses to install on Windows XP.
And now the good news. Since Ubisoft bought the rights to the Might and Magic brand, I went there looking to see whether they had picked up support of any of the older games. They do have the patches… and I just learned that Heroes V is in the works!
Class Dis-Mythed
Phil Foglio once again illustrates the Myth Adventures universe in the next book in the series: Class Dis-Mythed.
I don’t know how much of it is Jody Lynn Nye’s influence and how much of it is just Robert Asprin being re-energized about the series, but since they started collaborating the books have improved drastically. The new ones have much more of the feel of the early series, before Asprin burned out on it and spent a decade working through writers’ block.
(via the Studio Foglio newsletter.)
Super-Spawn: Titans
A thought: the original Teen Titans are beating the Justice League when it comes to passing on their super-genes. Leaving out possible-future stories and backstories, it comes down to just Aquaman of the core group, and Green Arrow as the most prominent member outside the “Big 7.”
As for the original 5 Teen Titans (now in their mid-twenties):
Speedy – now Arsenal, has a preschool-aged daughter, Lian (by way of international super-villain Cheshire).
Wonder Girl – now Troia, had a son Robert with her husband, but both were killed in a car crash.
Aqualad – now Tempest, has an infant son Cerdian with his wife Dolphin.
Kid Flash – now Flash, nearly had twins, but a villain beat his wife Linda so badly she not only miscarried, but lost the ability to have any more children. Update Nov. 2005: Time travel altered the attack, and Linda gave birth to healthy twins (who have yet to be named in print).
Robin – now Nightwing, no kids.
And of course if you do add in future stories, all five had children in Kingdom Come… who came back to visit the present-day mainstream DCU in “Who Is Troia?” in 2001.
Admittedly the mortality rate is high, but the 60% 80% birth rate certainly beats the core League’s 14%.