The Rampant Narcisism of SMC

Woah! I just saw that Darksun has been announced for 2010!

I never really gave Darksun a proper chance back in the nineties when it first came out. I just dismissed it as a game that was designed for power-gamers through and through. It wasn't until years later, I started to look at it again and realised what a fantastic game I really missed out on. What a fool was I?
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Does anyone know people that still play WoW?

I've been off the warcrack since last November, but with Dee going away for a few weeks in September, I thought it'd be a good time to go back holiday in Azeroth. There's a free month's subscription if you convince a person to re-activate their account, so I thought it would only be sensible to offer it up to someone since I'm planning to reactivate anyway.

So who's up for festive drinks on Tuesday? Normal time at Henry's Bar.

I'm hijacking Ash's thread http://ash1977law.livejournal.com/471454.html

Ok, I was originally suggesting going out for dinner, but Dee wants to do something special for me here. So, how would people like to come over to mine for drinks tonight? It's a bit last minute, so I'll probably ring around to get verbal confirmation, but go ahead and post here if this sounds like a good plan to yourselves.

How odd... We were sitting in the pub last night pretending we were a think tank for WoTC and over a pint revolutionised their entire line of minatures. I come in to work this morning and find this.

It's not exactly what we were suggesting, but it's a step in the right direction. To summarise, they're doing away with randomised boosters and separating the miniatures line into Heroes and Monsters. Each pack will be semi-randomised pack (some known, some unknown) of either hero style models or monster style models.

What we were proposing was in addition to the fully randomised boosters, having boxed sets of common models, themed to a particular monster type. So while most of your models will still come from the randomly selected boosters, you could also purchase a big bag of Zombies, or a big box of Orc, etc. We toyed with the idea of including a couple hero models in each pack along with a map and scenario leaflet so that each box could be a self contained game unto itself. But the ultimate purpose was to put a big whack of minion style monsters in the hands of GM's while still providing good value to the Miniatures crowd.

Last month I turned on the 'Advanced Web Stats' tool on my website provided by my hosting service. I was just curious to see what kind of traffic I was getting.I was a little disappointed to see that all they've done is turned on Webalizer. Still, it's interesting to see what they came up with. I've combined different versions of the same browser for brevity.

• 67.74% Firefox
• 13.42% Internet Explorer
• 4.55% Yahoo Slurp (a robot)
• 2.16% ELinks (a text only web browser)
• 2.16% Googlebot (another robot)

What can we learn from this? Not much really. The truth is, most of those Firefox hits were me updating my own site (I'm pretty sure that ELinks traffic was me too). People are reading it though, so it's not all in vain. I have taken the time to install a robots.txt file though to keep Yahoo and Google out of places they shouldn't be going.

I was just having a read of the latest news letter from the people behind the up and coming DDI.

The crux of the letter is that they'll be offering two levels of subscription, web content only (Dragon, Dungeon and the Compendium) for $4.99 a month. That's like £2, so all in all, that's not a terrible deal. Judging by the content they've put into the magazines so far, I'd say they're worth about that much. Even better, updates to the compendium are supposed to include future products as well as content from Dragon & Dungeon. This all makes sense to me.

But here's the part I don't get. For $9.95 / month, you can get the full package: that's web content plus character builder, gaming table, dungeon builder. So in exchange for $4.96 / month, I get to enjoy the privilege of using the utilities that you've made for my gaming pleasure. These are stand alone applications; so why do I have to pay a subscription to use them?

The only reason I can possibly think of is that Wizards have gone out of their way to make them phone home and require a subscription to use the products. The only one of those applications that requires any sort of network connection is the Gaming Table, and even then there's no technical reason why one user couldn't act as the host for the other players. Typical use case is a five-man party, that's only 6 users total. Hardware from 10 years ago could happily handle that.

--

Of course, this may all be academic since they've decided to build it using DirectX instead of OpenGL, thereby excluding the possibility of porting it to a platform other than Windows. It may run in wine, but I've never seen a 3D app that used DirectX render at more than 6fps.

Does anyone out there know more than me about the subject?

Some may recall about two months ago, my monitor rolled over and died on me. I'm quite pleased with myself, because I'm now here to report that it is working perfectly again. I tried shopping it around to see if anyone could repair it for me, but no one would even look at it for less than £50. In the end, I decided to just fix it myself!

My body is shattered and I can see my soul spilling out around me, staining the carpet.

Well, I thought that coming home from my holiday on Monday would give me enough days to recover from my jet lag to be ready to go out tonight, but it seems I was saddly mistaken.

( I blame the following itinerary... )

So in summary, I know I was exepcted to come out tonight, but I really don't think that's going to be possible. I'm sorry to everyone for bailing, but I really do need to marshal my strength for tomorrow.

I've just been doing some reading today on HTML5 and the new <canvas> tag. In short, it's a fairly complete 2d drawing API for javascript. Basically it's like having an older version of flash embeded into the actual html language, leading to all sorts of neat-o designs and applications.

The best part of it all is that we don't have to wait for the w3c to get their act together and finalise the spec, <canvas> is here now! If you have a modern browser (this excludes all versions of IE), you can check out some of the demos:

• An interactive blob
• raycasting demo
• Canvascape an html based 1st person shooter.
• Starscape - like the old screensaver

I've been playing around with some HTML+CSS and I've managed to perfectly replicate the new monster stat blocks from the new Monster Manual without the assistance of tables.

I've tried it out in IE7 and Firefox 2.0 and it's rendering correctly in both. The only problem with it at the moment is it doesn't have the little attack type icons. The CSS is there for them, I just don't have the actual graphics yet. I think I'll screenshot the ones from the D&D Miniatures rule book and scale them down. I'm pretty sure it has larger versions of all the icons (basic melee, basic ranged, melee, ranged, close, area) that I can turn into something usable.

Now, for my next trick, I'd like to do the same thing with character summaries. I'm at work right now, so I can't check, but do wizards have any sort of well designed graphical character summaries? The only one I can think of is the sample characters from Keep On The Shadowfell. I was hoping for something briefer than that though. Has any one seen what I'm trying to describe?

My online presence is going to be slightly hindered for the next little while.

In the early hours of the 27th of May, my monitor passed away peacfully in its sleep. Yep, it went completely dead on me. The other night it was working fine, and I wake up in the morning to discover it dead as Dorris.

It sounds like it should be a simple repair. It's obviously something to do with the power supply, which are usually cheap things to fix. But, until I can get someone to have a poke at it, it's going to have to sit on my desk and rot and I'll not have any internet access from home.

It just figures that just a couple weeks ago, I finally got off my ass and freecycled the giant CRT monitor that's been collecting dust in my bedroom for the past 3 years. On that thought, does anyone out there have an extra monitor laying around collecting dust? Any size will do for the time being.

The title exaggerates a bit, but this just in...

I was just watching BBC News 24 as I was making my tea, and caught this breaking story. Russel Davies has just announced that he will be stepping down as the head writer and executive producer on Dr. Who. He is to be replaced by... wait for it...

Steven Moffat.

And the peasants rejoiced!

I find I've been spending more and more time dreaming about the PVR that I want to build one day. It really isn't all that much money to put together, but it seems that there's always something else more important that I have to spend my money on.

Yes, I could just pop down to the Tesco's and buy one ready-made for less than a third of what I'm planning to spend, but that's not the point. I want to build it with my own two hands, something that is truely mine! Besides, it could never be as uber as the one I'm building is going to be.

Here's the breakdown that I've got planned so far...

Motherboard	Via Epia LN (Via C7 1.0 GHz, Integrated VIA UniChrome Pro AGP graphics, 8-Channel AC'97 Codec)
Case	Morex Cubid 2699V (63.5cm x 295cm x 272cm)
Capture Card	Hauppage Nova-T 500 Dual Capture Card
RAM	1GB DDRII SDRAM 533MHz
Hard Drive	Samsung 1TB, 7200 RPM, SATA II 300
Operating System	Mythdora (MythTV + Fedora, a winning combination)

The final price of this monstrosity I'm predicting will be around £350. Quite a steep price I know, but then I dream of all the roles it'll fulfill...

• Freeview Box (with "live" tv pause/rewind)
  
• DVD Player
• Games Console
• Media Jukebox
  
• Web Kiosk

one day... hopefully soon.

During my daily comic trawl, I stumbled upon this in a signature in some random forum.

Now through the miracle of YouTube, we can go back and relive the musical trends of ages past in the form of Microsoft Product Promotional Videos!

Behold....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po1vN0RUwrc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPv8PPl7ANU

I'd go looking for more if my eyes and ears hadn't already melted...

I was up at the shop this past Saturday and Steve was trying to talk me into running something at the upcoming con at CRG. He suggested some sort of Living Greyhawk game or some such thing.

I'm pretty sure that won't be a good idea, since LG really only works well if there's a community of people playing it regularly. The problem is that all new characters have to start at 1st level, so all you ever get are tables of 1st level characters. Having said that, some of the new RPGA campaigns get around that by supplying fast-play characters and having a minimum campaign level. So, say I were to run a Xen'Drik Expeditions game (Eberron), anyone who actually plays could show up with their regular character, or could just take one of the provided level 10 characters. So if I go RPGA, that's what I think I'll do.

The other option is to pull out another one of those Polyhedron Mini-Games. I think I'm the only person on this earth that ever tried to actually run any of those. That surprises me, because most of them are tremendous fun.

So, the question I pose to you, lazy-web, is what would you like to play? Are there any requests?

I'm sure everyone that cares, knows by now that Trent Reznor released his latest album Ghosts I-IV a couple weeks ago for free on the internet under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncomercial-ShareAlike licence.

I've been listening to it over the past few days and I'm really enjoying it. I really like Ghosts III. I couldn't tell you why, it just stood out amongst the others. Anyways, this isn't a review. I'm here to talk about audio scrobbling. There's this site called last.fm where you can connect your audio player and it records what music you listen to and creates a profile for you of that information.

Now, this Ghosts album is 36 instrumental tracks. I've given it a good listen, add in a couple other nin tracks I've listened to over time to the mix and suddenly Last.fm thinks I'm this huge Nine Inch Nails fan because I've listened to more tracks by Trent than any other single artist.

While technically true, this doesn't really accurately reflect my listening habits or tastes. The fact is, I have a lot of different artists in my music collection. The former top position was held by Mr David Bowie at 50 listens, followed by RHCP at 31. These numbers were organically grown and I think accurately reflect my preferences. Listening to a 36 track album twice through has crushed these other artists though and now my Neighbours list (users with similar tastes to yourself) is crowded by black pleather wearing nihilists that think it's still 1995.

Now I'm going to have to create a smart-playlist of my top rated songs and just leave my player running for a couple days on repeat to smooth the curve out a little bit. St00pid statistics!

Goodbye old friend. You sucked horribly, but you still sucked less than everyone else.

:sad

I've just discovered yet another piece of goodness on the inter-weeb that I'm sure everyone but me already knew about, but simply neglected to mention until now.

I am of course referring to Vassal. In short, it's a cross-platform (java) generic board game interface with online multiplayer support. Basically, you just load up the ruleset of your choice and can play your favourite board game with anyone else on the net. Yay!

Now, what particularly caught my interest, is that the definition of board game also seems to include miniature style games, and there is a rule set available for DDM.

I'm still working out the finer details of how it's all supposed to work, but anyone up for a game?