Disenchantment

I don't want to blog about Christmas, but I do want to keep my blogs up-to-date even though I'm not at work. You see, at work I can always think of hundreds of things I'd rather be doing and blogging is one thing that comes to mind since it's more creative than sitting on my arse all day waiting for someone to press the wrong button on their keyboard and then have a heart attack about it.

I finished adventure 5 for my D&D campaign, I hope to start it some time after New Years Day, I'll have to speak to Bob, Nick, and Sam about when they will be free. I think it will be a fortnightly meeting every Sunday but I can't be sure.

Throw Dirt

Yes, another picture. A Guild Wars related one at that. I have really found a new interest in this game.

Throw Dirt is a Ranger skill; using it on your target causes all adjacent foes to become blinded. A simple concept though yes? Grab a handful of soil/ash/snow/sand (depending on where you are) and rub it in someone's eyes. It's quite effective when you're surrounded by enemies attacking you in melee, but the concept is so simple that you would have thought other profession could use it (without taking Ranger as their secondary profession). Turns out, not so. My latest drawing illustrates some of the reasons that might be the cause of this.

I know that it's all done to balance the game so I'm not complaining. I'm just poking fun that's all.

My mum was in hospital yesterday. She still won't tell anyone exactly what it is she was being tested for. If she thinks she's being a hero or a martyr then she had better come around to the fact that she needs to let the people who care about her most know if something is wrong. Anyway, since she was still under some of the effects of the sedation, I offered to go and visit to see how she was doing and to cook for Sam. I made chilli con carne (with no red kidney beans because Sam has a strange aversion to beans in general) with rice, mum seemed grateful enough but kept avoiding any questions to do with her visit to the Conquest. >: (

That may just be the only smiley you will ever see on my blog.

The weather is almost unbearably cold. Whereas before I've been thinking myself unfortunate because my hands were cold on the ride to work in the mornings, this morning I think myself unfortunate because all of me was cold. Even my torso under three layers, one of which was my jacket.

I've started writing adventure 5 ("Liberation") and I think I've got a solid structure for it with equal parts drama, role playing, combat, intrigue, and nasty surprise. It may be relatively short, especially compared to some of the earlier adventures, but I want the players to remember every part of it at the end of the playing session since it is all important to the story.

I must get my head down and write a letter to AJ. Since he moved he has given up the Internet because it was apparently distracting him from searching for a job properly. Fair enough, that's a mature decision from my point of view and if he made it on his own without any intervention from his parents then all the better. Initiative has not been AJ's strong point recently, so perhaps this is a good change for him. Anyway, he gave me his address so I could write to him. I told him we mustn't lose contact. Anything I write now will probably not get to him before Christmas (damned holidays) so that gives me a little more time to think of more content for the letter itself.

Confusing Images

Nothing much exciting has happened since my last blog entry. I'm colouring another Guild Wars single-pane comic strip, and I'm thinking about re-designing Elesia just so that there is more than one look for Bob to choose from. I have already sketched out several rough designs but none of them really jumped out at me as one that fits the character. The one on my artwork web page is simply the cleanest drawing that I was able to scan and colour. At some point I will also have to do another drawing of Sten since Nick's description of him was very similar to the drawing I provided but when kitted out in his combat gear, the bard looks a little different to how I imagined him. I've got several Guild Wars inspired comics to draw, but I have to keep reminding myself to devote some time to getting adventure 5 written and out of the way so that gaming can begin next month.

I haven't actually played Thief: The Dark Project or The Metal Age or any of the fan missions for a while now but I'm hesitant to take the reference from my electronic distractions (see sidebar, left) list because they're still sitting on my hard drive/rocketdock. It's just that Guild Wars is taking a lot of my gaming time up now. I just reached the Crystal Desert having completed all the quests and missions in Maguuma Jungle. There are only about four missions so far that I've missed the bonus on but since I'm level 20 and have the same amount of skill points I'm not too bothered about it. Of course, being a level 20 character without a guild, I've had several guild invitations from people I've never even met. I've not accepted any yet but one guy did invite me to his guild's Christmas party on Tuesday. I'm not sure whether that will be in Tyria or Elona but I'm planning on attending. I don't think that they really need any more members since they have at least sixty people in their organisation, but for some reason they see the need for new blood.

When I arrived at the Crystal Desert last night I found I was the only person there. The same thing happened when I arrived at the Henge of Denravi. Thinking my character was probably sun stroked, I managed to worry the few players who did arrive five minutes later by babbling about being cooked by the sands and eaten by sand worms. Then we all sat down in a corner and traded stories. I may try storytelling again, as long as there's the right kind of crowd. I suppose this is where my secondary profession finally comes in useful. I've got at least two more good stories in mind to tell, I should hunt down some more in case I get asked for an encore. You never know.

In more important news, my mum is going into hospital on Wednesday morning. She will be groggy from the sedation for the rest of the day so I said I'd go over to help with anything that needed doing. This roughly translates as "I'll cook while you sleep it off." She seems to be kind of worried about it and hasn't given me any details, I think she'll be all right as long as she just takes it easy and Marcos and Sam don't give her any grief.

My bike is filthy. Why is the A21 so gruesome?

Oh yeah I saw Sam playing Mass Effect while I was over at my mum's last night for dinner (we ate a rabbit Sam had caught while ferreting. He said he had gutted it but the sight of two dangly little testes amongst the meat kind of put me off half way through the meal). The graphics are awesome and the rest of the game looks like it follows that trend. Sam likes being a "Renegade" (read: Arsehole) when he gets the dialogue options; his actions included shooting prisoners in the head, telling his team mates to stop being pussies all the time, shooting a scientist, agitating crazy people, cutting off his superior officers when they try to give him mission briefings, and generally poking his gun up peoples' noses until he gets what he wants. A neat little thing about Mass Effect seems to be that you can improve both your Paragon (i.e. light side, good, heroic alignment) and your Renegade (i.e. dark side, chaotic, bad-ass, anti-hero alignment) at the same time without one taking away from the other the way they did in KotOR. Most games that record your good/bad alignment often only view the situations you are put into in black and white. Mass Effect seems to have an added sense of grey. Always good.

Signet of Capture

I managed to get my TV capture card installed and working last night. I recorded a few minutes of Assassins Creed but didn't keep the video since it won't do me any good yet. What I don't understand is how I'm supposed to capture sound. The card's manual wasn't very good (the whole thing was only £14.99 from Amazon so I'm not sure if I should really be complaining), the diagram of the capture card's sockets didn't match up to the card's actual layout so half of setting it up with the TV was guess work. Sound is currently non-existent as there aren't two sockets for the left and right channel composite cables, there's just one socket into which the composite video jack plugs into. So I don't know how to record sound which is very annoying. I tried messing around with the sockets on my sound card and on the capture card itself but nothing has seemed to work. If I could find a way of converting the two composite sound jacks into one standard 3.5mm audio jack then everything would be fine, but I don't think such a feat is possible.

Part of the reason I didn't keep the Assassin's Creed footage is because even though when I do use it I won't be recording any sound, there are audio cues that help you play the game and without them certain tasks become more difficult. Also it's just no way near as fun. So the footage I did record was mainly me falling off buildings, jumping into the sea, or getting my back-side handed to me by regular city guards and soldiers. Playing on my monitor reminded me how rubbish a bog-standard second-hand thirty-quid TV's resolution really is. No wonder everyone wants to upgrade to high definition.

The other thing that was captured last night was my evening. When I looked up after setting everything up and recording a few minutes of test footage I realised that it was already nine o' clock. Where the hell did the evening go? Who has been stealing my time?

So I didn't manage to start planning adventure 5 or sketch rough copies of my next project or... anything like that. I think that if I want to try recording stuff again I'm just going to lug the 360 (or whatever) upstairs to my PC rather than the other way around.

Winter's Embrace

I'm going to have to find a way of warming my gloves in the morning before riding to work because damn that wind is cold. Half way to Robertsbridge I think my fingers are going to fall off... and it's not even January yet! I've taken to leaving my gloves on a radiator pipe at work all day so they should be toasty warm for the ride home tonight.

Last night I finished Assassins Creed. There was a wee bit too much you are trapped and must listen to me justify my fiendish plan to take over the world but other than that it seems like the designers wanted to get people on the edge of their seats for the sequel. I doubt people will be as crazy for it as they were for the Halo sequels but I know I'm looking forward to it. Oh and I really hope they don't take away water's lethality. Only twice did I curse when falling into water in Assassin's Creed and not once did I think "If I could swim this game would be so much cooler", if I was angry at anything it was the inaccuracy of my own jumping skills. Seeing NPC pickpockets would be cool in the sequel, so would variation in the "help the citizen" side quests (such as chasing a pick pocket and returning the stolen goods to the citizen for a reward). It would be nice if drunk/crazy/poor people harassed NPCs as well as the player.

In other news I have produced yet another picture! What is going on? I'm spewing forth creativity left right and centre. Well, perhaps not to that degree but I'm on a roll. Tonight I'll start the rough plans for adventure 5 (called "Liberation"). The image I drew was of Bob's character in the campaign so that when I'm running it I can visualise his adventurer easier. Nick and Bob gave me really good character back stories and descriptions to work with, I already know what Sam's character will be like because he has played the same halfling rogue for four out of six campaigns. I still want to develop his character along with the others though, perhaps the presence of two veteran role players in the group will help.

Anyway, here's the image. It's also on my site's artwork page (naturally). I'm still not happy with my capability to draw women. Why must they be so... so... subtle? An orc with more muscles than brains, and armour that increases his already imposing mass is easy to draw. He's even easy to draw in combat or while dead. But women, oh no, they have to be complicated to illustrate. I suppose that's why so many fantasy artists favour feminine characters to bring to life; it's much more difficult to pull off but the reward at the end is so much more satisfying because in the face of such a challenge you've created a more aesthetically pleasing expression.

Signet of Creation

Just a short note.

I've uploaded several files to my website's D&D page including the fourth adventure in the campaign; "The Wizard's Tomb". Dungeons and Dragons veterans (and perhaps even new comers) might accuse the title of sounding cliché but trust me, there's a twist. I'm getting very close to being able to run my campaign now. I think I'd like to start it after New Year's since then there aren't too many holidays getting in the way of gaming.

I've received my capture card and the Disney's Aladdin soundtrack so at some point I can try them both out and think about making that Assassin's Creed machinima music video Nick joked about (his face then took a pale tone as he realised I liked the idea).

Cry of Frustration

In the interest of getting our appalling equipment at work up to speed, someone thought it would be a good idea to get into open source software. Guess who (with no training what so ever) gets to lead this new, arbitrary initiative?

I really don't like it. I'm used to an operating system that does everything for you in the background. Sure it costs money, but you pay for the ease of double-clicking a file and having it open for you instead of going through a terminal command prompt, changing permissions on the file, changing the way it opens, opening it through some obscure string of code and then finally having it tell you it is incompatible with your OS. It's almost as if it can't decide whether it's DOS or a Mac.

We've tried Kubuntu and SuSE and I'm not jumping on the Linux-is-great-Windows-is-the-devil bandwagon. The directory system is enough to put me off, as is the difficulty I've had with updating things like Firefox or Konqueror.

I've used Open Office at home and that was fine. Not as fancy as Word 2003 but I would use it if I didn't have the cash for Microsoft's word processor. I'm not entirely against open source software but if I have the choice then I'm very likely to sway towards the corporate giants' way. I even had a nightmares about Linux last night, not that I could sleep very well.

In other news my bike is in for its 5,000 mile service. I should be picking it up this afternoon. And on the topic of bikes, Kawasaki seem to have decided that burnt-candy-orange wasn't the right colour for the Versys and have gone for Ninja-lime-green on their website for it. Why? Are all Kawasaki bikes going to be lime green now? The only alternative apart from suicide-black now is some kind of electric blue which is even more vomit-provoking.

Troll Unguent

The background colour looks a little odd but that's because I tried to mimic the colour scheme of Troll Unguent itself. You might not get the joke if you haven't played Guild Wars.

In short, Troll Unguent is a ranger's primary source of healing in Guild Wars (other than friendly monks). It is not supposed to be used as sun tan lotion.