With news of a 6.1 aftershock hitting Haiti today, DriveThruRPG is offering gamers a way to contribute to the relief efforts in Haiti by purchasing a “once in a lifetime collection of games” from their online store for only $20. This mega-bundle contains over 120 e-books with a total retail value of $1481.31 and is an amazing collection. All of the money raised by sales of the package are  going to Doctors Without Borders Haiti Earthquake Response. As of writing, the community had raised $28,870.00.

The full details on the gaming mega-bundle can be found here.

Continue reading Gamers supporting relief efforts in Haiti

Designer Mike Thompson has created a lamp that is powered by human blood. His intention was to show how the importance of energy to human existence and how the overexploitation of aforementioned energy could bring about our end. In the process though, he appears to have created one of the most gothic forms of lighting we have ever seen.

Continue reading Possibly the most Goth lamp ever designed

One of the great things about getting together with friends for a game is the food and drink shared around the table. Anthropologists tell us that eating and drinking together is one of the very basic activities which have united groups of people for millennia, and is one of the most fundamental ways of expressing social inclusion we have. Well, one of the very earliest alcoholic beverages known to us is Mead and it is very easy to make yourself.

Continue reading Catering for Your Game: Brew your Own Mead

The Star Wars Uncut project is perhaps one of the most awesome projects started online. Basically anyone can claim a 14 second portion of the film to remake in their own fashion. So far there have been acted scenes, animated scenes, puppets, drawings, IM’d conversations, etc. So far the film is 56% complete, which has meant that they have finally released a trailer for the project. There are still 183 sections left to be claimed (as of writing that is…) so be quick to claim your scene.

Continue reading Get your friends together – Star Wars Uncut needs your help

For those of you who love horror fiction and roleplaying, yet also don’t mind a bit of academic/philosophical speculation, let me introduce a wonderful resourse: Collapse volume IV. This is a special edition of an academic journal on philosophy, this time specialising in horror fiction. Those of you who have a particular weakness for Lovecraftian fiction (such as myself) may be interested in Graham Harman’s article, “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl”, which starts on page 333.

Continue reading The Philosophy of Horror

I have discovered a quick and easy way to get Facebook Notifications on your iPhone without having to wait for version 3.1 of the Facebook App to deliver the feature natively (which is still might not do either). While this system doesn’t automatically drop you into the Facebook App, it will send you push notifications to your iPhone.

Continue reading Getting Facebook iPhone push notifications without waiting for Facebook App 3.1

If you thought you had a big book collection (and I thought I did with some 1800 volumes..) then you are probably in for a soul crushing experience… In yet another example of a beautiful and highly enviable library, Shelfari have had the extraordinary honour of getting to peer through Neil Gaiman’s library, but also take a series of photos of it. Many of you would know of Neil Gaiman’s work. He is the man who has given us the comic series ‘The Sandman’, the books ‘American Gods’, ‘Stardust’, ‘Coraline’ and my personal favourite ‘The Graveyard Book’, and he also wrote the screenplay for ‘Beowulf’.

Continue reading Take a peek into Neil Gaiman’s Library [Updated]

For those of you on Twitter, you would already be familiar with the #followfriday tradition. For those of you who are not familiar, on Fridays, people all over Twitter recommend people you should be following (because they are interesting, fun, informative, or whatever). The following list is a selection of the more gaming oriented or nerd oriented that we follow.

Continue reading Our Dice of Doom Follow Friday Recommendations

The good people over at io9.com have compiled a chart documenting the rise and fall of various themes within sci-fi and fantasy TV shows since the 1970’s. The five trends documented are Aliens & Mutants, Robots, Magic, Space Travel and Time Travel. The chart provides and excellent overview derived from 300 shows showing how trends have come and gone.

Continue reading An excellent chart showing the rise and fall of Sci-Fi TV

Today we begin the first of a series of (hopefully weekly…) articles discussing various powergaming strategies in D&D, both 3.5 and 4E. But what do we really mean by powergaming? How can we discuss details without understanding it? Well, that’s where this article starts. What is it? Is it good or bad? How far do you go?

Continue reading D&D Powergaming: Introduction