DrupalCon Boston is looming large, but before I get there I decided to go visit my sister in New Hampshire. It's a long trip -- seven hours or so from Easton, longer with the family in tow -- so I had plenty of time to get caught up on my podcasts.

Geek musician/singer Jonathan Coulton (Skullcrusher Mountain, Re: Your Brains) lives in Brooklyn, New York, which isn't all that far from the Lehigh Valley. Yet to the best of my knowledge, he's never played here, which is something I'd like to change.

There's a Lehigh Valley "demand" for him in Eventful:

http://eventful.com/demand/D0-001-000000412-0

This is basically a webified way of asking someone to come play in your area; by accumulating votes we can show that there's enough folks in the Lehigh Valley to make it worth his while.

Click the link and vote if you'd like to see him perform in the area.

Your doom is upon you, pathetic humans. Buy A Very Scary Solstice from CthulhuLives.org

When Halo 2 was released, it was accompanied by a soundtrack. Unfortunately, it wasn't the soundtrack fans had been hoping for: instead of one featuring the music from the game, it instead pulled the old "music from and inspired by the game" trick. While a few game tracks could be found on it, including "Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix" and "Ghosts of Reach", it was also loaded with tracks by Breaking Benjamin, Incubus, and Hoobastank.

It was tolerable. The game-specific tracks were great, and a few of the "inspired by" tracks grew on you over time, but it wasn't the soundtrack we wanted.

Volume 2 is that soundtrack.

Martin Rayla has a great thread over on Treasure Tables about using music in your game. He's not talking just about having something going on in the background, but also crafting a soundtrack that matches the expected actions, fights and drama that the players will be experiencing.

I've used music in my games before, but I've never made a concerted effort to sync up what was playing with the "on screen" action. That said, it's something I've wanted to do for a while, and our recent playtest of Battlestar Galactica gave me an excellent opportunity to try my hand at hobbling together a score of my own.

I've been losing myself in BioShock for the last three weeks or so, fighting my way through a pseudo-Randian dystopia that's as engaging as it is beautiful. Part of what makes the game so exception is its soundtrack, which is by turns cinematic, classical and terrifying. Now you can enjoy composer's work outside of the game by downloading the soundtrack for free from the BioShock web site. And yes, I will be figuring out someway to include this in a future role-playing game session...

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

Maybe it's having just listened to hours upon hours of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, but I truly enjoyed the 300 soundtrack's martial mix of choral singing, Mediterrean/Middle Eastern-inspired music and a touch of hard rock explosiveness.

This weekend saw my home improvement efforts redoubled as I patched and primed the walls of our third-floor bathroom, dug up a third of our admittedly-small backyard in order to sow grass and clover seed, and pulled staples from our hardwood floors in anticipation of getting them re-finished. And naturally, all of this gave me plenty of time to listen to podcasts.

Midnight Syndicate will be teaming up with Hollywood FX legend Robert Kurtzman (Dusk till Dawn producer, co-founder of the KNB EFX Group) and his production company, Precinct 13 Entertainment to produce the horror-suspense film, The Dead Matter.

Development has been underway for several months and pre-production officially began March 1st. Principal photography is scheduled to begin in Northeastern Ohio this August with a projected release date sometime in 2008. Edward Douglas will be directing the film and producing it through the newly-formed Midnight Syndicate Films division of Entity Productions, Inc. The company is currently in talks with Doug Bradley (Pinhead from the Hellraiser series) and Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster, Air Force One, Lost) to star.