If you know me, you know I drink copious amounts of tea. In work, I regularly drink four to six very large mugs of tea during the day and I continue that rate into the evening too. But now, when I drink tea I don’t like it. I only sip it a bit, nearly out of just habit. The reason is that the taste of milk in my tea is overpowering, and not that particularly nice. Before I got sick I didn’t notice it at all, but now I find it awful. And I’m not sure I like tea without milk! What is strange is that I have no problem with milk in my breakfast cereals or cream on my pasta. Just in tea.

It’s really odd experience. For example in the evening after dinner I have a craving for a nice cup of tea and relax on the sofa  while the kids are finally in bed. However I hold back, remembering the taste of milk, but still having that carving, but nothing to fill it. It leaves me a bit restless, not sure how to fulfil the craving. Most of the time I just go and relax anyway and forget about it. 

Luckily though I beating back my new found aversion by just regular cups of tea over the course of the day. The taste of milk is still quite powerful but it’s getting less.

I could read in this some depressing thought about humans (i.e. me) are just creatures of habit and we don’t really change, but who cares. I need my little drop of caffeine okay?

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

Option 5

Option 6

Option 7

Option 8

(poll after the cut)

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(Hopefully this post comes out alright on LJ, I can never be quite certain how my Wordpress posts translate to LiveJournal style anymore)

Demon Icon

Olympians Icon #3 (Colour)

Olympians Icon #2 (Black Background)

Olympians Icon

The second image I’ve only barely finished. This again was intended to be part of my Lost Heroes RPG project. It’s meant to represent the Olympian and associated Gods. I did quite a variety of designs, finally settling this one. But I’m still not completely happy with it. In fact I did two further varianets of it, which you can see below. The first one I wanted to highlight the rose more so I used solid black for the background and tried to add texture with some hatching lines. The second one, I used colour to highlight the rose, a big departure from the previous icons I’ve done. I’d rather keep to the black and white motif (easier to print) but the colour would does look quite nice. Perhaps I should play around with using greys as well as black?

(More new art and a poll after the “link”)

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Part of the reason I enjoy doing these icons is that it helps focus my mind on the next section of writing for Lost Heroes. It drags me into it, into thinking about what is important to represent in that section. Strangely most of my work these days is focused around Lost Heroes, even that which isn’t directly intended to be part of the project. For example, despite losing some of the access to my place to write, I did manage to complete this very short story: Laura and the Stalker with the Golden Blade. While it stands alone as a piece of fiction, it is embedded very much in the mythos and setting of Lost Heroes displaying many of the themes I want to put into the project.

So when I started just drawing for the sake of it, I came up with this on the right. Again the iconography and themes of the art is all Lost Heroes. I like the composition of the piece though I think it might have worked a lot better using ink instead of pencil/charcoal. Though charcoal is fun to use, dirty and messy and getting your hands into the piece. This piece on the right shows a much earlier incarnation of the same idea. I don’t know if I have “improved” since then, but I do enjoy more.

I also did one final image. It was sorta rushed but I did it on the wave of the previous piece. It’s a scene I keep imagining in my head (again, based off Lost Heroes). This rendering doesn’t do it justice, but the composition and layout of elements is there. Again done with the messy pencil and charcoal, though I think it would really work with striking black and greys.

(Poll won’t work on LJ, so come on over to thedeadone.net to vote)

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Ah, my wonderful daughter!

 For those unfamiliar with Dr. Who, this is a loose translation from the mind of a four-year-old to father-geek level…

“In Dr. Who, the Darleks say ‘Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate.’”

Inspired by the relaunch of IrishGaming.com v2 by Nick last month, I
decided to give Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki [1] a big spring
clean (not a relaunch). I’ve changed hosts, upgrade the software,
gotten rid of all the spam and other malicious edits, re-did the
front-page (more to do there) and allowed file uploads. I hope people
take a moment to have a look and see if anything important to them is
up to date.

I have also updated Planet Irish Gaming [2], brand new spanking
software, tons of Irish Gaming sites, its actually very busy compared
to the old planet. There are also features to create a post directly
to the feed and the ability to submit new feeds.

During my spring cleaning, I found a number of articles about groups
and websites of which I have no idea of the state of them:

http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/SaneSpotting
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/DU_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Gamers_Realm
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/White_Elephant
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/D15_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Fabled_Games
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/STOCS
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Red_Branch_Guild
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Vaticon</a>
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Forgotten_Legacy

Anyone able to give an update on their state or current
web-location/presence of these things?

Also the http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Convention_Calender has died
a death quite a while back. Is there another resource that’s actively
used? I know there was one for a while on the IGA/Gaelcon site but
that seems to have disappeared.

[1] http://IrishGamingWiki.com
[2] http://IrishGamingWiki.com/planet

Someone has since updated the Convention Calender, which is cool. There is a lot of work still to do on the wiki, but for the moment I’m content to watch over it and if someone starts the initiative, I’ll help and finish it. For example, I’d like to have “templates” for conventions, retailers, groups and organizations. Right now they are all done sort of ad-hoc and the current status of a lot of them, I don’t know.

Anyway, if any of the readers of this blog know of something on the wiki they might care about, please take a moment to update it or even better if you know something about the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying community that <i>isn’t</i> on the wiki, please feel free to add it! And if you have any feedback, you can drop a comment here, or on igaming or the wiki itself. Those three methods are the best way to get a message to me about the wiki.

I hope people do because I’m certainly feeling guilty about letting it languish over the last good while. I couldn’t update the MediaWiki software without a bit of effort on my part and it got spammed heavily. But recently I did do an update and finally cleared out the spam and blocked users and IPs. (If spammers continue to be a problem, I’ll look at better spam-fighting techniques). The administrative and backend parts of the Wiki need some love, certainly some work on the webpage look and feel, updates to the RSS feed, etc. I even have a logo designed at home that I haven’t scanned in yet.

I haven’t set aside time to do this necessary work. I haven’t had the motivation at all. I did recently update and tidy up Planet Irish Gaming as I was briefly inspired after IrishGaming.com was kind of re-launched (IrishGaming.com has nothing to do with me in any way). But beyond that, my motivation is still waning. I’ve even been tempted to find someone or group who would be willing to take over the wiki because there is a lot of cool info captured there. No-one has shown any interest to me about it up until now and I haven’t see any group I’d trust with it (things for Irish Gaming have a tendency to appear and disappear with frequency online).

So what is my big plan? Change host for the IrishGamingWiki.com and stick Google AdSense advertisements in the side bar.  That’s it.

If you’ve just shrugged your shoulders and thought “so what?”, I’d agree with you. I have AdSense ads running on my thedeadone.net and, to be honest, the income generated so far would indicate to me that it probably won’t cover the cost of hosting the website over a year (even though hosting it is relatively cheap).

However, payback in nearly any form is a great motivator. Certainly, while working on TDOMF, which is completely free, donations, gifts and ad revenue that I have received have been great motivators (though peoples’ feedback is by far the most rewarding). Without it, I don’t think I would have continued to support and extend TDOMF so far (and to think that came originally from the failed Game Crafter’s Guild of Ireland website). So hopefull I’ll be more motivated to put effort into maintaining it and doing work on it.

Anyway, comments, feedback, criticism welcome but name-calling will have you tarred!