Author: Wil

If you're of a certain age, do you remember the first time you saw AKIRA, or any of the Dirty Pair or original Macross cartoons? Coming from a steady diet of Hannah Barbera cartoons, it was like trading a transistor radio for a high-end stereo or seeing the grand canyon with my own eyes. The cinematic scope of the entire thing just blew me away, and my world was fundamentally changed.

The first time I saw AKIRA, I was 13 or 14, and it was on a fifth generation VHS bootleg, purchased for some ungodly sum at a con. My friends and I watched it over and over again, without the benefit of subtitles or dubbing, developing our own storyline that we would eventually learn had nothing at all in common with what was really going on.

It was a very different world back then if you were into anime or just about anything outside of mainstream culture. The Internet didn't exist at all like it does today (the closest we had were large closed networks like GEnie and Compuserve – this even pre-dates AOL) so we just didn't have tons of cartoons and communities at our fingertips like we do now. We relied on whatever we could find at cons – often at great expense – or what we heard though a grapevine that was nearly as reliable as the one in Johnny Dangerously.

So when I saw a post on Reddit titled "I saw AKIRA for the first time last night. Would someone explain WTF happened at the ending?" this morning, it was with great amusement that I left the following comment:

You damn kids today. When I saw AKIRIA for the first time, it was a fifth generation VHS bootleg, without dubbing or subtitles. We had to make up our own story to go along with the animation, and when we finally saw the movie with dialog we could understand, we discovered that everything we thought was wrong. And we liked it!

I'll tell you what happens at the end of the movie: Tetsuo gets off my goddamned lawn, and then I call Kaneda's parents.

For those of you looking for a serious and more insightful answer, Redditor themanwhowas has got you covered. I highly recommend checking it out.

Seriously. How cool is this? In my little geekmind, the lamp on the left is related to Luxo Junior, and is wishing it had the necessary hardware to enjoy a nice mug of tea.

See more Wheaton's Mug in the Wild (including my friend Mer looking beautiful, and the best binary birthday celebration you'll see all day), or get your own mug from the Memories of the Futureshop.

Edited to add this comment from Tony Buser, who made this awesome thing that is awesome: 

Hey that's my picture! When I saw that mug and realized it would fit perfectly on my MakerBot build platform, I bought it specifically so that I could take a picture of it sitting inside. 🙂

In case people don't know, a MakerBot is a 3D printer, like a prototype replicator. It creates objects using molten plastic. I've named this makerbot "Tea". Right now I'm printing the parts for a new improved replicating 3D printer called a RepRap that can recreate most of it's own parts. The new printer will be named "Earl". By the 4th generation upgrade, "Hot", I hope to be able to scan and replicate this mug like a prototype transporter. It will probably take quite a few more versions before I can fabricate actual edible Earl Gray, though.

The Future! We live in it.

We totally do, Tony, we totally do.

Because I am too busy for a proper post, I offer a very brief trip report:

I went to Seattle at the end of last week, where I not only got to spend three days with my friends from Penny Arcade, I finally got to take a tour of the Wizards of the Coast offices after years of being invited to check them out.

While the offices weren't quite as Wonka-like as my inner 12 year-old (and outer 37 year-old) hoped they would be, it was still pretty awesome to see lots of dragons, several suits of armor, more dice than even I own (which is a lot of dice, guys), and three framed uncut sheets of original black bordered Magic cards.

I also got to visit and talk with the people who make D&D and Magic (they have all the same xkcd, PvP, and Penny Arcade comics hanging on their office walls that we all have, which was kind of neat), but I have an NDA with WotC so that's all I can say about that.

During my trip, I got to drop into my friend Mike's D&D game. His DM is this incredibly creative guy Rob, and Rob came up with a brilliant way to let me play a character who was more than just a hireling. He actually let me play a NPC who they'd interacted with the previous session, gave me a rich backstory, let me add some details of my own, and set up the evening's session so that it was mostly a massive (and incredibly fun) battle. He also let me make some choices and reveal some information that could have an impact on the rest of their campaign.

The session was incredibly fun, and I thought I'd refer to it in a column I'm working on about how you can keep the R in RPG, even when you're playing a session (or sessions) that are mostly combat, so I e-mailed Mike and asked him what Rob's last name was, so I could spell it correctly and everything.

"It's Rob Heinsoo," he wrote back.

Now, I'm guessing that a nonzero number of you are now picking yourselves up off the floor like I was when I got that e-mail this morning. For those of you who are wondering why the other kids in class are dazed for one round, allow me to explain why: Rob Heinsoo was the lead designer of D&D 4e, and wrote the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

In other words, it was kind of like getting to play Dragon Age RPG with Chris Pramas, or Magic with Richard Garfield, only you have no idea who you're playing with. In hindsight, I understand how Rob was able to effortlessly weave me into and out of the campaign, and how he was able to come up with some truly awesome combat effects and deal with unexpected situations entirely on the fly. All those times while playing that I thought to myself, Man, this guy really knows how to use this system suddenly make sense.

Okay, real quick, before I sign off and get back to work: y=2m+x.

I had the house to myself last night, so I could watch whatever nerdy DVD or DVR'd movie I wanted, as loud as I wanted. I've been talking about re-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended editions, of course) for a couple of months, but when I finally had a chance to get started, I ended up playing Dragon Age for three hours instead.

I love Lord of the Rings, and even though I've been trying to get Anne to sit down and watch it with me again for months, when I had my chance to watch it undisturbed last night, I wasn't nearly as interested in going back to Middle Earth as I was in going back to Ferelden.

I've been playing Dragon Age for about 64 hours, and I'm finally starting the climactic battle portion of the story. (Yeah, I take my time and get every last second of RP out of the RPGs when I play them.) Last night, I had to make some very difficult decisions, one of which resulted in a character I deeply care about leaving my party. It wasn't as upsetting as losing my dog in Fable II, but I still felt a real, emotional sense of loss. I don't know if I'll ever talk to this NPC again (at least as this character, with this origin), and that made me feel sad. 

It also made me want to keep playing so I could find out what happened next … and so I did.

Knowing that my dog would wake me up at 6am and demand to be let outside, I still played until 1am, not because I wanted to kill the damn Darkspawn, not because I was trying to level my character and not because I just wanted to complete a quest. I intentionally allowed myself just 5 short hours of sleep because I hoped against hope that I could somehow find a way get [REDACTED] to come back and rejoin me. Alas, I failed. There were a lot of Darkspawn, and I just couldn't get past them all before it was really time to go to sleep. (Guess where I'm going as soon as I finish work today?)

Some of you are probably wondering why I didn't just save scum and try out different things until I got the desired result. I should probably mention that when I play any computer RPG, I use one savefile, plus a backup in case it gets corrupted. Yeah, let that roll around in your heads for a second, kids: daddy is hardcore. I should also point out that the choices I made last night – indeed all the choices that lead up to this particularly momentous one – were all made from a roleplaying point of view, based on the background and story I created for my character. I know that I could have just told different party members whatever I thought would make them happy and keep them around, but even though that's the kind of metagaming that keeps you from dying in the acid pit, it just isn't how I roll.

But here's the fundamental difference between playing this fantasy RPG and watching a fantasy movie: when I finish this character and play a different origin, I'll be able to make different choices that will (hopefully) lead to a different result when I get to the same place, 70 or 80 hours hence. Of course, there's still the chance that I'll end up in exactly the same place and discover that this event happens no matter what I do, in which case I'll say a swear really loud … but even if that happens, the journey that I'll take to get there that time will be different from the journey I took to get there this time. Sure, the major landmarks won't change, but the little details will, and that's an experience we simply can't get from movies (The Watch George Lucas Shit On Your Childhood editions of the original Star Wars trilogy DELIBERATELY IGNORED.)

I think this says something significant about video games as narrative storytelling, and I wanted to paraphrase something I said when I was interviewed for the Sci vs. Fi Mass Effect 2 special that is apparently airing every ten minutes on SyFy this week:

Narrative video games aren't going to replace television and movies any more than television and movies replaced books, but as technology continues to advance, and games become even more cinematic and interactive, the battle won't be only for the consumer; it will also be for the creator. People who went to school 20 years ago to learn how to make movies are now going to school to learn how to use the same narrative storytelling techniques to make video games.

It's going to be a fierce battle, and even though I think it will likely be fought to a draw, we're going to get some incredible entertainment out of it. As creators and consumers, we're going to experience things that we can only imagine right now, and I can't wait.

(Thanks to my friend C., who made this when I needed a bit of cheering up.)