Armored and Dangerous (or Idea Times of Old)

Just did some websurfing and decided to look up something that reminded me of the old high school campaign days which became the Twilight Empires project of my friend and a far cry from its initial Gamma World RPG roots. I was reading up again about Iron Man, a Marvel Comicbook Series. It was that title along with X-Men that got me more along the sci-fi trail for sure. That and a number of sci-books, TV shows and anime.

It was something of a wonder for me to look at such an intriguing piece of high tech. Fictional or not, its still pretty good tech to look over. It pretty much puts me in with the techie junkies, more of the conceptual sort than one who goes about building or drawing it up. Such exposure makes me fluent enough to have mastery of the language in obvious circles, as techno-babble.

It all started when I got a hold of copy of the earlier Marvel Universe Handbook series in which they had an issue called "The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Book of Weapons, Hardware and Paraphernalia" which I bought a long while back when my comic-collecting days have just barely started in high school. All that technical illustrations and terminologies in it got me drawn in big time. Its a bit dog-eared due to my initial lack of comic-handling and preservation skills then, but it still served much as my initial foundation to refashioning the campaign setting from post-nuclear apocalyptic world to a quantum jump to the high-fantasy/space operatic setting that will become the Twilight Empires for my friend's project. It also kept me on the path of being a fiction-tech technologist. Even if matters of magic are brought in, I would try to put a sci-fi slant into it.

If one were to look at it, a la VH1's "Behind The Music", the entire enterprise of that world's building is all a matter of pilfering a lot of things we wanted to put in and showcase. It was an unspoken escalation of sorts as access to outside media and info because a task unto itself where basic creativity is not enough to pace with a lot of eyecandy and ideacandy becoming available to a high schooler's means and budget that time. Of course, this was back in the 80's, way before the era of the Internet, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM media, Network Gaming and tons of anime. Back then, one has to go about it the hard way, reading pocketbooks, encyclopedias, some magazines, technical and science books plus the occasional dip into that wordtome, the dictionary. Now in the early 2000's we have so much sources of information that the line on originality gets to be less defined and differentiated from the inundation of data, useful or junk, from the Internet and other media, especially from computer games and anime.

Negatives aside, the effort from all that idea and data trawling yielded an interesting mix and synergy of ideas and creativity which somehow makes an orderly sense in spite the apparent chaos from the culling of the data and ideas. I find it in retrospect, that some ideas trawled would have a time and place for it to be of use since it was retained by how many times the stories of the game have been retold with my many exchanges with my friends and fellow gamers in high school. As I said before in an earlier post, informartion is a commodity. No matter how irrelevant the information is, it can be refashioned, reformatted or repackage for use at the right moment. The occasional thoughtspark of an idea can occur to me whether as a sliver of an idea or question, it just happens after exposure to something familiar or occurs to form at unlikely times.

As to imagination and stories of old, I can sum it simply enough that sometimes the best ones or touching ones are those simply thought or made when one is a child. I'll leave it to these lyrics from "When I needed you" from Erasure's "The Innocents" album:

I’d like to be a child again
So many things to do
Playground noise, and coloured toys
And everything brand new

I’d like to be a pirate ship
In search of hidden gold
On ocean waves that swim away
And sail around the world

-chorus:
Where, where were you
When I needed you most
When I needed a friend
Where, where were you
When I needed you most
When I needed a friend

I’d like to be a soldier
A general I would be
In battle and in glory
With ten thousand men to lead

I could be most anything
There is so much to see
I’d live a different story
If you were next to me

Chorus

Chorus

I could be most anything
There is so much to see
I’d live a different story
If you were next to me

Where, where

Chorus to fade


Yawns. Enough of me talking. Will keep on posting. Till next time.Goes back into the doghouse. Seconds after entering the doghouse, sounds of machines, crackling of energy and other tech sounds emanate.