Mildly funny comment spam!

I got this piece of comment-spam today:

Josh: I don’t understand why churches and ‘family groups’ spend millions of dollars a year on abstinence-only instruction when a World of Warcraft account only costs fifteen dollars a month and has a much better record of ensuring virginity.

Gave me a giggle just before I deleted it.

My Tweets for the week 2009-08-24

.@atmc35 You’re using my “goth” Hello Kitty sketch I did on Saturday as your avatar? #
Okay http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~planet/ for @RedBrickDCU is finally back up. Any brickies out there have blogs to add? #
Shared by Mark I can’t believe they did this. First Sherlock Homes and now Dorian Grey (two books I love). This .. http://bit.ly/UL3Ws #
Shared by Mark If websites were people! http://bit.ly/LUMDK #
watched the latest Dollhouse episode last night (hasn’t been shown in US yet). Very dark. Not sure how it’ll impact the new season. #fb #
Also kinda cool was KARR in the new Knight Rider series. Very “transfomers the movie”. Hopefully he’ll make a comback! #
Testing crossposting to twitter. Does this show up? #
is trying out Laconia open micro-blogging software. Set up Redbrick Twitter as a test: http://is.gd/2oxzg #
is heading home to a night with the kids (wife is away with work). Oh lovely. Susauges and mash tonight I think. #fb #
Shared by Mark I want to play it now! It looks fun.
Nintendo released a new trailer for New Super Mario Bros… http://bit.ly/Fmloe #
Shared by Mark Now thats how you do the Lindy Hop! http://bit.ly/C33KG #
Shared by Mark Great reply to a crazy lady! http://bit.ly/jIXbm #
was planning to do some writing tonight, but ended up checking out watchtheguild.com. Entertaining. #
I found my daughter talking about how the swan that flew in2 her creche, odd. Translation: her teacher was talking about “swine flu” #fb #
Posting a tweet from identi.ca http://is.gd/2pSQq #
Posting a tweet from pidgin to identi.ca to twitter… #
Shared by Mark Finally! Pidgin has been my main IM Client for a long time and this is a big feature that’s been .. http://bit.ly/10eaKJ #
Shared by Mark Interesting things to do with sheep (surprisingly SFW) http://bit.ly/4pMN05 #
saw the trailer for Heroes season 4… could be good, but somehow not impressed. #
My wife has returned from the US bringing gifts: another beautiful popup from Matthew Reinhart to add to my collection! #fb #
My daughter’s translation of a Japanese song: “hey yea yea tickle in my bag!” #fb #
Some snaps of the popup my wife got me. #fb – http://twitpic.com/etu6o #
Ah crap… twittermail only accepts one attachment per email. Will try and upload more later. #
Just finished watching season 2 of @theguild. Now can’t wait till season 3 in September! #

I spent 60 euros on art stuff and did this

I spent 60 euros on refilling my art stuff and I was itching to do some drawing. This was the result. Enjoy:

I’m back two weeks already? My my my…

This is what three weeks looks like

Two weeks on and I’m still lacking much motivation. Things are getting up to speed though, shortly my daughter will be going back to school signifying the end of the summer and the routine will dramatically change again and in work, all our customers have returned from their holidays and have started dumping crap on us again. And it’s taken me two weeks to just sit down to write this post. Shouldn’t really take that much, but energy and focus have been lacking. I guess the dull weather since getting home has putting on a drain, especially when we had such lovely weather on holidays.

(More pics and drawings after the break)

Suffering “post-holiday-blues” :(

I’m back a week already and… I’m feeling quite tired. The weather on our return has been awful and I’ve spent the last week cleaning the house out of the built-up of dust and the mess we left before our holidays. The garden has overgrown to the point we can’t find the sunbed in the back garden. And my motivation for work has been really low.

Anyway, I suspect things to resume to normal over the next few weeks. I will get around to all things in due course, slowly.

I can also see a mountain of support requests via email and forums for TDOMF, which is so daunting I’m really procrastinating about picking up the PHP tools and hacking away at them or at TDOMF.

Going on holidays tomorrow! :)

So I’m going on holidays tomorrow, for a goodly period of time (but not too long). Can’t wait to get out of here and stop worrying about the recession, work, weather and everything else for a little bit.

I’m looking forward to it, not least because it’s time with my family but also because it’s time I get to indulge my creative hobbies, normally my drawing, writing and coding. No deadlines, no plans. In fact I finished off my One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge early because having a deadline was definitely focusing me but to the exclusion of all my other creative interests. Of course my family takes first place in practically everything (and I can’t wait to see my daughter again as she went ahead to spend a week or two with her French granny), but there generally enough time to get into stuff I don’t do at home.

I’m bringing my trusty/quirky 10-years-old laptop with me, but I won’t have internet access or even local TV. That’s fine for me. I’ll have a local webserver installed, so if I feel like it, I may work on TDO-Mini-Forms Wordpress plugin (not bug fixes though, but additional features and refactoring). I’ll have my sketchpad, pencils, paints and bright clear weather to work by. I already have a number of projects I’d love to attempt. And my old laptop with OpenOffice and an install of Bazaar allows me to write away with few worries (and I have a score of ideas and projects just waiting to be cracked open). I’ll even have the time to read tens of books, compared to the measly one or two books every few months I do the rest of the year.

I’ve also been recently getting into twitter (@thedeadone) and using it quite a bit, more so then I blog. But I’ve found I can twitter from my underpowered non-iPhone mobile so I may be sending some tweets and pics from my holidays. I’ve even setup my Wordpress blog (so that I can post from my phone too (thanks to a cool plugin called postie), so possible expect some short updates and photos here.

See you in a while!

Magic Character add-on idea

While working on the Fudge One Month Adventure Challenge (I’m not going to finish it in time, but that’s not really the point), I had an idea for a RPG magic system. I was thinking about how to put the entire system on a single page for the adventure I’m writing, including a magic system and I wanted to keep it simple to understand. A brief discussion on the mailing list and it got me thinking about what magic should be in a roleplaying game.

I know, this is a big can of worms and everyone but everyone has an opinion about what should a magic system be or how it should feel etc. But this is about what I think magic should be like in a game, not anyone elses and my feeling is that magic should be strange, weird and mysterious. Of course this is completely at odd with the mechanical/systematic nature of roleplaying systems and settings. You need magic to be some what systematic otherwise it is nothing more than random rolls on a table. I also think magic users should be different to everyone else, they should see and react to the world different. They live in a world-view that’s is alien to the average joe, that’s what makes them magic users. Be that world-view spirits and demons or UFOs and aliens.

Playing with the Lost Heroes RPG: “Book of Gods” Cover

I also had the title “An Adventures in Graphic design and Typography!” in my mind when I started putting together this post, but I think that might be a bit melodramatic. If you’re following me on twitter, you’d have seen this image before, but for those that don’t, what do you think? Does it look like an RPG you’d play?

Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers

Don’t mind the text on the back cover. It’s just a space filler for when I really write something.

I took a short break from working on Lost Heroes RPG and end up working on Lost Heroes RPG! Swinging from writing to graphics and layout. I just started playing around with ideas on paper for the front cover of Lost Heroes as a book and ended up taking it to the end.

I don’t think my efforts are professional, but they look good, good enough to fool you from a distance! I’m working with my “limits” here, using what I can do well, to produce something that looks good. The above image was generated using Inkscape, Gimp and original artwork by myself. The little icons I’ve been working on all along (just check out the “drawings” tag to see more about them).

I have to say, I’m loving Inkscape as a tool more and more. I can easily move around and edit elements of the above image. And the images are all ~~scalar vector graphics~~ scalable vector graphics so I can print them out at any resolution and they look good. I’m not sure how they’ll fit into a Desktop Publishing Tool when I finally start to think about layout of the PDFs later for Lost Heroes.

: Inital Concept (pencil)

: Fleshing it out (pencil)

: Fleshing it out #2 (pencil and ink)

: Final Ink of Figure

: Working with the Figure on Computer

: Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers

Here you can see the process in a little more detail. I used pencil, ink and charcoal while playing around with it. My original idea was the abstract “angel” with the floating symbols and a rope tided around his legs pulling him back down to a graphic-inspired city scape. I imagined the logo for Lost Heroes sort of exploding from the top of the image.

I’m not particularly happy with the Lost Heroes logo. It works but its static and a little boring. Doing a little search on “typography” found me getting quite inspired, realising that the text is as much part of the picture composition as anything else. Playing around with it, I wasn’t getting convincing or pleasing results though. I ended up just laying it out and modifying the other elements to work with it.

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