Posts Tagged ‘vampires’
The Evolution of Role Playing Handbooks
Still no official news on Captain America, although The Office guy, John Krasinski is thankfully out, as are others, and a few more are in, so who knows at this point.
Looks like Mr. Smith himself, Hugo Weaving, will be playing Red Skull, which I couldn’t be more thrilled about. I’ll keep you posted.

First let me start by explaining what I originally used role playing handbooks for. I owned the 3.5 edition Player’s Handbook for D&D, and White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade early on, but not because I was actually playing either of them with a DM or storyteller, or a crew of fellow geeks. I used them for character creation.
I am a writer, if you haven’t figured that out yet, and not only for ranting opinionated blogs like this one. I write fiction. The format of role playing handbook character sheets and subsequent measurements for, say, strength, as an example, really helps in imagining the actual strength of a character. And it doesn’t just have to be a character for role playing.
You can fill out a character sheet and by the end have a well-rounded character for a story, or your latest role playing endeavor, with a clearer picture of what that character is like and what they are actually capable of.
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The Vampire Chronicles vs Twilight
I hate Twilight. I think Stephanie Meyer’s poorly written and inane series is the worst thing to ever happen to fictional vampire culture. Possibly the entire fiction world.
Vampires that sparkle in the sun? Seriously?
And don’t even get me started on the abusive relationship between Mr. Hot Vampire Guy and his totally unremarkable leading lady.
But this isn’t a forum for me to bitch about Twilight. At least not today. Today I am comparing as impartially as possible the franchises of Twilight and Anne Rice’s older series, The Vampire Chronicles that began with its most notable title, Interview with the Vampire.
My bias is even worse here since I have reed the entire original series by Anne Rice and I absolutely adore it, at least up until the point when the author lost her mind, but again, I will do my best to remain impartial throughout.
Onto the history.
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Vampires On TV
Vampires on TV do not begin and end with me, sadly, so I have not had the pleasure of seeing every single vampire television show ever to grace (or disgrace) the small screen.

I have, however, seen an impressive amount of the many that existed and will be discussing those that I watched, as well as my opinion on why certain vampire shows sucked so badly—pun intended—and why others were quite entertaining.
Okay, so in my opinion, any vampire television show is going to have some level of entertainment to it, even if that is only to make fun of it. Why else would I bother watching the series premiere of The Vampire Diaries last Thursday, a blatant attempt by The CW to bank off the Twilight phenomenon, unless I was expecting horrible, horrible entertainment out of it?
As for my first vampire series, it began its run in 1992.
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