Yearly Archives: 2013

Terry Tucker the Midnight Trucker – Ep. 1 – “Copacabana Dreams”

Here is the first episode of Terry Tucker the Midnight Trucker from Snow Arch Films.

In the first episode of Terry Trucker the Midnight Trucker, Terry gives a ride to Ian who’s a little distraught over having lost his job at Banana Pancakes. Will Terry be able to give Ian the business advice he needs to make his dreams come true? Hop aboard and, “Don’t give up on your dreams!”

The James Spader Podcast 4 – “Starcrossed” 4.14.13

In this episode of The James Spader Podcast, hosts Mike Gray and Chris Onderick of Snow Arch Films and Erik Pepple with the Wexner Center for the Arts, dive into “Starcrossed” (1985) directed by Jeffrey Bloom. The cast comes replete with excerpts from an exclusive interview with director and writer Jeffrey Bloom, as well as a discussion of a “Starcrossed” remix, and finally a rather long-winded tangential discussion about logo culture.

Download or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or your newsreader.

Document scanners

I’ve been hauling around boxes and boxes of notes from my past. Things from graduate school, things from college. Things I had poured years of my life into. As a result, I have a hard time throwing some of this stuff away, even though there’s a 99.9% chance I will never use it again.

Recently, I searched around for some kind of service to scan it all in for me for a price, but it appears that most of those places cater to businesses. Scanning all my crap on a flatbed scanner was depressing since it would be way too slow of a process. I even thought about renting storage space to store this crap in just to free up closet space.

Things changed during my brief tenure at a nuclear power plant, where I was introduced to a $5000 document scanner than could scan 90 double sided pages a minute (180 pages). It was crazy. It was also $5000. Sure it slowed down when you scanned at a resolution I would use (600 dpi) for archiving important stuff, but you could still chew through a binder of papers in 5 minutes or so. A little bit of research turned up their consumer version for $400, the Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500. I figured that would be small price to pay to allow me to part with some of my crap with no guilt, so I bought one. It scans about 30 pages per minute at 600 dpi, which is 60 pages if you are scanning in duplex.

This thing is amazing. So far in the two weeks I’ve had it, I’ve scanned over 5000 pages1, enough to fill a 12″ x 12″ x 24″ box. Most of this stuff was handwritten notes, written lightly in pencil on an assortment of paper types (legal paper, notebook paper, engineering graph paper, and printer paper). The auto adjustments for darkness are pretty much perfect and so far everything has come out great. Better than what I got from the aforementioned $5000 scanner. The software will also automatically remove blank pages, i.e., the back sides of paper if you are scanning in duplex. The OCR is pretty quick too, so you can get searchable PDFs. If you are on Windows (I’m not) you also get a full version of Adobe Acrobat X, which is a pretty nice program.

In addition to my old physics notes, I’ve been archiving old investment and bank statements, allowing me to shred that stuff and get rid of it. Once the years of backlog material is worked through, when a new bill or statement comes through, it will take about 20 seconds to scan it and file it.

This short review probably sounds like I’m getting paid to write it. I know I don’t normally write shit like this, but this is seriously a really useful purchase that will change the way I deal files. If you don’t have as big of a backlog as I do, I think Fujitsu sells slower but cheaper scanners. I figured I’d spend the extra money since after I finish my files, I’m going to work several other people’s files, and the extra speed will pay off.


  1. Mostly scanned during the first week of ownership. 

The James Spader Podcast 3 – “Endless Love” 3.31.13

In the third episode of The James Spader Podcast, hosts Mike Gray and Chris Onderick of Snow Arch Films and Erik Pepple with the Wexner Center for the Arts tackle “Endless Love” (1981) directed by Franco Zeffirelli. In addition to James Spader, the film would feature performances from Brooke Shields, Martin Hewitt and serve as the screen debut for Tom Cruise. What will the verdict on the film be, and will the word “patriarch” be mentioned during the course of the discussion? Listen and find out!

Download or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or your newsreader.

Endless Love
Endless Love

The James Spader Podcast 2 – “Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction”

In the second show of The James Spader Podcast, hosts Mike Gray and Chris Onderick of Snow Arch Films, and Erik Pepple with the Wexner Center for the Arts, examine Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction (1983) directed by Paul Wendkos and featuring performances from actors Dennis Weaver, Karen Grassle, Jeffrey Tambor and Pamela Bellwood. Special guests Joel Stigliano and Marissa Wolf also join the show and perform remixes of scenes from the movie in an attempt to discover if there is sympathy for Tambor, and whether or not this TV movie has it in spades.

Download or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or your newsreader.

Cocaine: One Man's Seduction
Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction

Shatsucon ’13

This past weekend, I reconvened with some of my Shizz friends for a birthday get-together in Massachusetts (Shatsu = Sherv, the birthday boy, + Mastunami, the person who hosted). At some point early on, we spontaneously decided that we would try to beat as many games as possible during the weekend, on both emulators and original hardware.

Here’s the final spreadsheet of the over 50 games beaten.

You can see my contributions as “Ken Oh”. You’ll notice me manning my favorites, such as Rygar and Zelda 2 (the latter on original hardware, meaning I lost a couple of hours to glitching). Some of the more epic achievements were Gremlins 2, Batman, Astyanax, Castlevania III, Castlevania: Dracula X, and Street Fighter 2 (on an actual arcade cabinet, with difficulty on the DIP switch put to max). Orb-3D also requires special mention for endurance. It’s a shame that no one made it through to see the end with me, as it took me until 6:30AM to finish it. I had to leave the end screen on for the others to make note of when they woke up a few hours after that.

The James Spader Podcast 1 – “Team-Mates”

The first show of the James Spader Podcast takes a look at Spader’s screen debut, the 1978 film Team-Mates, directed by Steven Jacobson and written by Jennifer Lawson. In addition to Spader, the film also marked the screen debut of Estelle Getty of The Golden Girls fame and is the second screen appearance of character actor Irwin Keyes. Join hosts Mike Gray and Chris Onderick of Snow Arch Films, and Erik Pepple with the Wexner Center for the Arts, as they decide whether or not Team-Mates is a movie that really scores!

Download or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or your newsreader.

eD&D

We used to play D&D when we were younger. Then we went away to college. We still played every once in a while, over the summer, or over the random holiday, but not that much. Years later, Protocon occurred. Despite Mike’s mislabeling of the 2011 event, we actually had 4 of them. Most Protocons featured some form of role playing game; one year it was Star Frontiers and for Protocon 4, we played about 3 pages of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

Sometime near the end of 2011, I started playing D&D again with some people I knew in college. It was fun. Then I moved. I realized that finally technology had gotten to the point where we could conceivably run some games virtually. We could all get on Google Hangouts and video chat at the same time. As a bonus, you can share documents and pictures in your session, so I could throw up a map or something and people could draw little icons representing where they were, etc. I talked it over with people and everyone seemed interested.

After moving, life was a bit hectic for all of us. Tom got married and Mike and Joe had just moved too. Things finally settled down after the new year and we scheduled our first session to test out video chatting and to roll up some characters.

Things were a little rough, but promising. I discussed (virtually) with everyone different options I was thinking about for maps:

  • No maps like we used to play in 2nd edition – all in your head.
  • Using a Google sketch document to place a background image and move around
    icons.
  • Use a program like Maptool.
  • Use a cross between the two above options, like Tabletop Forge.

Everyone seemed to want to avoid the first option for now and try out 3rd edition’s more tactical battle, which requires a map and miniatures. So we tried using a sketch document as a makeshift map. My take on that: It can work, but it’s a pain in the butt. It’d probably work better in a 2nd edition environment to indicate positioning, but with anything that requires more precise locations, like attacks of opportunity, etc., it becomes a bit of a headache. The number one problem is there is no way to lock the background image, so if anyone, player or GM, misses an icon and accidentally targets the map, the map gets dragged. Which is a drag.

We also checked out Tabletop Forge. It worked in the Google Hangouts environment, and provided some extra functionality over a sketch document and wasn’t as involved as a full-blown solution like Maptool. Unfortunately, it was still too early in the development phase to work (in my mind).1

Lastly, we tried Maptool. I had some issues getting the right ports open on my router in the first go, but Brian and Mike really liked the idea of the more sophisticated map. I didn’t exactly relish all the extra preparation that would go into running a game with Maptool, but it was duly noted how much they seemed to like the idea, so I told them I’d investigate it a bit more.

The next day or so, I stumbled upon Roll20. Wow! This was it. A nice clean easy to use interface, the ability to use it within Google Hangouts if you wanted (we don’t yet), and some nifty extra features like visual line of sights, fog of war, and keeping track of some simple stats like hit points. I started loading in maps right away.

That was about a month ago. We’ve actually had 2 or 3 playing sessions, and besides the one where Mike’s computer kept overheating and shutting down, it works surprisingly well. One game has been completed, A Dark and Stormy Knight, which was free from Wizards of the Coast. This past weekend, we just started on The Keep on the Borderlands, by request of Mike. It’s a pretty shitty adventure in many ways since there’s so little in the way of a plot actually in the module. Unfortunately, not only due to my lack of motivation to really make it good, my skills are a wee bit rusty. Hopefully it will turn out okay though. In a future post, after we finish it, I’ll put up some of the extra maps I drew for the game and do a post-mortem.


  1. Shortly after I paid a small amount of money to have access to the newer betas of Tabletop Forge, the developer decided to merge efforts with Roll20. As a result, I get access, for life I think, to the Roll20 subscription features like dynamic lighting and ad-free play. I can say this about these features: If you play at least once a week, it’s totally worth the $5/month subscription. Especially if you can get your players to pitch in.