szaijan's blog

Not as addicting as "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?", but may be funnier for those who've ever sat at an Indian restraunt and watched the music videos they're spoofing here.  Great stuff!

http://www.watchtheguild.com/the-guild/the-guild-season-4-music-video-game-on/

The site was down for a few hours this morning.  Should be back up now.

I'm looking forward to seeing this game in November (or a bit later.)  I loved CoH, really wanted to love Champions Online (but so didn't), and am now looking forward to this title.  It will release on the PS3 and PC simultaneously, hopefully with users able to play together on the same servers, but I'm not holding my breath on that last front. The original article is here.

Mel and Stephanie have recently brought to my attention an author I knew nothing about a year ago, but who I currently hold a couple steps lower than Butcher on my list of active authors.  From me, that's high praise.  The first books I read were three of the Tales of the Nightside, which are novellas reminiscent of Harry Dresden as written by Clive Barker and/or Neil Gaiman.  Very entertaining.

What's really caught my imagination though are the Tales of Hawk and Fisher.  The books are collections of short stories which are reminiscent in all ways of Fritz Leiber's excellent Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.  I loved those books, and I like these no less.  The main characters are a husband and wife team who represent the only two honest city guard captains in a thoroughly corrupt and filthy city.  Most of the stories are mysteries, which are fun but nothing special, in and of themselves.  The excellent characters and lurid imagery of the city of Haven are what make these books and I'm absolutely loving them.

One of the best features of the web is the ability to easily integrate images into stories and articles, making them more attractive, immersive, and often more informative.  There are tools for uploading and inserting images into content you create for the Guild Avatar website, and this Help entry is intended to tell you how to do it.  The tools are not particularly intuitive, so a brief tutorial was definitely in order.

A Few Caveats, Provisos, & Quid Pro Quos

The file extensions that are allowed to be uploaded are limited.  Currently these are limited to: jpg jpeg gif png txt html doc xls pdf ppt pps odt ods odp docx xlsx dnd4e.  If you need other extensions added, please let me know.

The maximum file size you can upload is 2MB, and a graphics resolution of 1024x768 for images.  You also have a single user limit of 100MB.  Please keep your uploads to a reasonable level and use smaller and lower resolution images where possible.

If you play in any of the D&D or Pathfinder campaigns managed on this site, you may want to add your own information to the "books" (a set of related web pages with links to one another) that have been set up for them.  The "book" for the Tremon campaign is at http://www.guildavatar.com/pathfinder/tremon, for instance.  That book and most of the pages under it belong to Bear, i.e. he has permission to edit or delete the content on those pages.  If you want to have your own page, you need to add it as a child page of one of the books.  If the page relates to your character, it should be added as a child page of the Characters page, at http://www.guildavatar.com/pathfinder/tremon/characters.  To do this, we'll use the fictitious character Sample as an example.  Go to the Characters page, and click on the 'Add child page' link at the bottom right hand corner, per the screenshot below:

I've been seriously contemplating development of an iPhone game for the last few weeks. Now I have an idea and have been playing a few iPhone "MMOs" to get a look at the competition. Mostly, games like Kingdoms Live, and other identical "click" games, suck. The strategy is so dirt simple that it amounts to get income first, by sitting around and buying it, then start playing when everyone is essentially in the same boat. Not for me. A few days ago, I downloaded a game some of the players claimed was a better experience. It is, but it's still very different with what us "real" gamers are used to. It's called Kingdoms at War. I find it quite addictive. Like all of the games, it's meant to be played for a few minutes at a time, possibly as many as 15-20, many times throughout the day. It's a capital building game, where you explore land to build buildings to build troops that allow you to attack other players to get more money to explore more land... you get the picture.

If you haven't seen the new Elmore Leonard crime drama Justified yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. I absolutely loved the first episode. Everyone in the cast was top notch, the production values were stellar, and both the hero and his first adversary were riveting. In wanted the villain dead and hoped he'd be around for future episodes in equal measure. Great new show.

I consider Ender's Game to be one of the best sci-fi books ever written. The follow-ons, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide... not so much. I haven't read the books about Peter and the Ender's Battle School compatriots, but I may do so now. I just finished reading Ender in Exile. Not so much a sequel as a fill-in for what happened between the time Ender won his battle and the time he found the Hive Queen. It's an odd sort of book in that it just ends, There's no discernible climax. It's just a few hundred pages of Ender as the main character in a story where I already new the beginning and the end. Apparently that's enough when the character in question is Andrew Wiggin. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, but it's really more like unearthing some lost sections of the end of the first book than reading something new.

I loved the first two seasons of the new BSG (hereafter jst BSG), even more than I detested the original. It was some of the best TV I've ever seen, not quite rivaling my beloved Firefly. The space battles were just incredible, the characters were compelling, the acting, directing, and writing first rate. Then the wheels started to come off and I lost interest most of the way through the third season. As you can imagine, I was not all that enthused at news of a new prequel series. When the the reviews were luke warm and my friends who have seen it had mixed feelings, I pretty much decided to skip the whole thing. Last night, not feeling like watching anything else, I decided to watch it with my family.

Amazon LInk

Please join me in welcoming Don and Felipe to Guild Avatar and the Avatars DDO guild. Along with Chris Brown, these are our first new members since Phil... so it's been a while. Welcome to the team, boys!

The NFL has fielded, without question, the worst group of playoff teams I've ever seen. Fortunately for them, the only legit contenders managed to not get upset at home last weekend, and what's left is almost a typical offering, sans any truly great team. I was 4 for 4 on my playoff predictions last week, but frankly I had no confidence in any of the teams I chose. They were just better than their heavily flawed opposition.

Jason is now the Proud father of Piper Rowan Stults. Add your congrats below. Huzzah, Jason!

Has anyone played Star Trek DAC or heard anything about it? Looks like a fun space combat sim game, available for $10 on Steam. I may pick it up, but I'd like to get some feedback first, if anyone knows anything relevant.

Most of you have probably seen this long ago, but for those who haven't I found it hysterical. Peyton Manning's public persona is one of the nicest, cleanest cut, and generally aww shucks images I've seen in sports. This faux United Way commercial plays mercilessly on it. Great stuff!

I purchased the Digital Deluxe Edition of DA:O over Steam yesterday, and Mel picked up the PC Collector's Edition. They're effectively identical. I'll likely get a second copy for the PS3 eventually to play with my family. I've been waiting impatiently for this game for three years, and everything I've heard about the game play sounded like a Fantasy Mass Effect. As ME is, without a doubt, the finest CRPG I've ever played, I was VERY stoked for this title. Admittedly, the screen shots and videos did little to whet my appetite. The art style is very gritty and Shadowbane-like (in style, NOT quality), and it just lacked the flash and color of even ME. All that fell by the wayside as soon as I got into the game.

I installed a new module in Drupal that will make signatures for Blog posts, Forum Topics, and comments on those two content types automatic. When you update your signature in the user settings it will dynamically update on every post you've ever made. If anyone else would like a graphical sig for their posts, let me know. You should no longer see the HTML for your sig in the body of the post when adding or editing new nodes and comments. All sigs will be placed inside a 400 pixel wide div and will be spaced one text line from the content of your post, so it should be pretty much invisible to the user. Let me know if you have any issues.

Please make sure you set your 'Default Timezone' setting in your User profile. If you're in the US, use the one of the America/City_Name timezones, such as America/Los_Angeles or America/Chicago, as that will track with the Daylight Savings Time adjustments of that city. The default timezone for the site is America/Los_Angeles, but it should default to your user settings if you have selected a Default Timezone.

This flash based web show was recommended to me a week or two ago and I've now watched all available episodes, including the excellent music video, "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?". The video is also available on iTunes. Alternately disturbing, hilarious, and often both, the show is a great lampoon of MMO addiction and dedication. Sometimes it may cut too close to personal reality for comfort, but that's part of what makes it good. You can view all the episodes here. BTW, it's actually fairly high quality low budget live action, not animated. The pic to the left is just from the very short episode lead ins.