My six year old daughter watched me get the images ready for the previous post and went off with her pens and did her own version of Cthulhu:
(My original:
)
She also did her own version of the plus symbol for the dice design as well:
(My original:
)
Now to get her programming and gaming… 
So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.
I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.
I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.
I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!
I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.
But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:
Now with my two designs, I sent them.
And I got the results in my hand right now:
I think they look rather cool myself!
(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)
I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:
Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!
Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!
So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.
So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.
I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!
Even finding time to write this blog post is problematic, having to push it into the few spare minutes during my lunch break. I simply have not found the time to work on TDO Mini Forms. Well that’s not entirely true, I haven’t found time and motivation this last six months.
Part of the problem is that I implemented TDO Mini Forms for fun, a neat little plugin for WordPress I could use on some web projects (all dead now by the way). Then it was driven by my love of coding and the small crowd of users. But I changed projects in work several months back and could no longer slip the time in to bash away at some code for myself, at least during the daylight hours and now there is a mountain of support requests on the forums that I can’t even comprehend getting through and a slow disconnect between what I enjoyed about it and what I wanted to enjoy about it.
Essentially, it’s not fun any more. It’s bug fixes, RTFM and maintaince upgrades (with WordPress 3.0 is coming and that’s like a big stomping unstoppable giant, which I fully expect to splat my plugins…) it becomes daunting. I’ve added too many features (that can do wonderful things), and people either complain about them (“it’s too complex”) or demand more (“editable image uploads ftw!”). The whole code base of TDO Mini Forms evolved chaotically and the idea of re-writing (and having to maintain some degree of backwards compatibility) it’s quite off-putting.
And then I’m working on another creative project that I’m genuinely motivated about, but isn’t software. And when I have free time, I dive into this project, because I want to, not because I have to.
It might be more interesting if I was getting more out of it, say I was a web-developer (I’m not, I’m embedded engineer) and it was promoting my career or getting my clients, I was a big wordpress-advocate and people were coming to my blog to hear the cool things I say (I don’t have much cool things to say, unless you like tabletop roleplaying…), I was making enough money from donations I could afford to get a new gadget every once in a while or it was powering a big project I loved, but it’s not.
So I’m not sure where that leaves TDO Mini Forms. I think probably it’s been on an unofficial hiatus for the last while already. I don’t want to dump it, but I’m not sure of when I’ll get back to it. I have been thinking about it a lot, but not working on it. (I may write up those thoughts in a future blog post).
One thing I will say, if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and hard to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid.
I have to send out a big thanks to all the people who have donated to the plugin. I really do appreciate it and it’s why I went so far with it. Thanks for listening.
My current avatar for the game is female. Much prefer to watch her slay monsters than him, don't you think?
I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii over the last week. Still working through the offline game so far. There has been a lot of hype about this game, but it matches up to what I expected, which isn’t the same as what is hyped. I debated with myself if I would get my money’s worth out of it as it appears to be a game that requires a bit of a time commitment (and a bit of “grinding”, something I swore I’d never waste my time doing), but in the end, it was watching How to Train a Dragon for a second time with the kids that changed my mind.
Read More…
Back when I was wee, there was a TV show called Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap was about a Scientist named Sam Beckett who got caught in a botched experiment and ended up “leaping” into people in the past (but within his lifetime) and changing and improving their lives. Putting aside the whole “higher power” thingy going on, it was a great idea.
I remember when a teenager discussing with my friend what you do if you leapt back in time to a younger you. It was a fun thought-exercise. And for some reason I started thinking yesterday… “what if I, the adult me, leapt back into being a teenager?”
My wife is currently watching “American Idol” and normally I escape by working on my current creative project/hobby (hint). But last week I reached, I guess, a nice milestone. And since then, I’m “floating”. I am between projects (I know what the next thing I’m going to work on), but I’m not restless. It’s a sort of “creatively” content and I’m without frustration or need to dig into something. It’s a nice feeling.
I asked, not too long ago, if anyone had suggestions on sharing stuff from google reader in a nice way into WordPress. No-one answered and I didn’t find any solutions myself.
However, I did come across this plugin for WordPress: Quick Post. It didn’t install properly when I tried it, but I played with it and bit and got it to work. What it does is add a little “Bookmarklet” (works in Chrome and Firefox at least) which you can click on when you’re on a webpage and it’ll pop up a window with some details of the page you’re on already embedded in the post. What is nice about it, is that you can select a portion of the page, click the bookmarklet, and it’ll pop up a post with that text in it. It can also embed videos and images.
How does this solve my problem? I can’t get Google Reader to automatically create a draft post. But that’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be sharing loads of stuff here, so doing a little bit of manual work is fine. I just go to the link, select a summary or an image and I can use Quick Post to generate an entry. I’ll have to copy over my comment, but that’s fine. It forces me to write a blog post instead of just dumping a link compared to say doing it on Facebook or Twitter.
I did some digging, planning on forwarding my fixes to the author, and found that it is no longer supported! Not only that, it’s already supported in WordPress 2.6 (the latest version is 2.9). It seems if you go under the Tools menu, you’ll find a link called “Press It”, which you can drag to your Browser’s bookmarks. This little bookmarklet does something similar to Quick Post. Go to a webpage, select the text from the page, click the bookmarklet and you get a simple post screen with the link and title plus your summary. It’s pretty funky.
My one complaint is that if you want to use an image from a website, it only allows you to use the URL as the image (i.e. hotlinking). It doesn’t automatically download the image, which would make it the ultimate solution.
So there you go, that’s my wordpress tip for the month. Now you shouldn’t have any excuse for automated regurgitated content.
… at least according to Amazon.co.uk.
I get these regular “you liked this books, so you probably like this one” emails. And yes, I’ve bought a number of Alan Moore’s books from Amazon, like Watchmen. So I was quite surprised to see this!
Alan Moore wrote the New Testament in the Bible!
(The product in the email is real btw and is genuinely listed as being by Alan Moore, the author of Lost Girls. Quite a leap from that to this!)