Limited time! Gotham City Rollergirls shirts!

No, not those skaters from Gotham. This is a mashup of female DC comic characters and roller derby. They're available on Teefury now.

Apart from Harley, they're all missing helmets (unless Batgirl's helmet counts as a derby helmet... I'm not sure what the WFTDA rules are about the face mask bit but I'll let it slide). The art's all done by TomKurzanski.

However, as with all Teefury deals, they only last for one day. As of writing this, you've got just over 21 hours to pick up yours!

WFTDA changes rules about what counts as a derby number

It's time to retire those jerseys that say "B00BS".

Today, WFTDA announced that, by the end of next year, jersey numbers will not be able to include alphabetic characters.

Specifically, they state that the rule change will not go into effect until December 2015, so that teams
will have time to adjust to this. I suspect that what they mean by this is that teams have time to get new jerseys for their skaters, or that you can start saving up for your new jersey now.

The Olympics is international, and
Usain Bolt gets letters on his jersey; why can't we?

It's not clear what the motivation for this is, except that there is some speculation that WFTDA's international reputation means that it shouldn't be relying on the Roman alphabet, as some places don't use that. However, that argument only goes so far, as surely the same can be said for different numbering systems as well. Conversely, it might be argued that international scientific systems, or sporting systems, like the Olympics, have to agree on using a particular alphanumeric system as well, so why can't WFTDA?

It seems that this will go over well with refs and officials more so than skaters, where reading numbers is way easier than letters.

Roller Jammer is a video game that predates modern derby

So there's recently been a group of people who have ported all these old-school video games (like Frogger, Pac Man, etc.) to make them playable in your browser. The whole collection is available to play for free at The Internet Arcade.

Amongst the offerings, I found a game called Roller Jammer.

So of course I played it, and while it's obviously not a game about WFTDA derby, you play a skater who has to pass a bunch of other opposing skaters and you get points for each one you pass. You can also jump and punch them.

WUT?

Some scrounging online shows that it was made in 1984, which makes it older than the current reincarnation of roller derby, which started in the early 2000s. My mind is blown.



Here's a video of some of the game footage. Or you can play it yourself here.