The best way to start the 2010, I’m still standing!

I will quote a few of my tweets from last week instead of summarising what happened:

1st thing, I am okay. 2nd thing, car is write off. Got caught in black ice.

http://twitpic.com/y12ck – The car

More photos of the crash: http://is.gd/6fryI – Quite drained, lots of calls with insurances etc. The car is officially a write-off.

I remember reading an article about on “luck” and that it mostly boils down to perspective. The car may be write up, but I walked away from it and no-one else was hurt. Thats luck.

The best comment spam ever?

I just got this in my “possible spam comment for approval” email for this blog:

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!

I like the little touches to the spam, the email address for the comment is in the format:

russianmobvictimXXXXX@gmail.com

Bad joke comment-spammer keeps on rolling today

The bad joke comment-spam keeps rolling in today on one of my blogs:

Here there can not be a mistake? I have a fresh joke for you) Why did the bunnies go on strike? They wanted a raise in celery.

You are not right. I am assured. I can defend the position. Write to me in PM. A joke for you peoples! What did the worm say to the caterpillar? What did you do to get that fur coat?

It is remarkable, rather amusing information Wanna joke?) Why do Vampire have to brush their teeth? Because they have Bat-Breath.

*groan*

A new “mildly funny” comment-spam today!

I suggest you to try to look in google.com, and you will find there all answers. I have a nice joke. Why was Santa’s little helper depressed? Because he had low elf esteem.

Obviously spammers have a bad sense of humour.

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.

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)

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.

Flower Fairy Final

I finally put some time aside to finish off my “Flower Fairy” image. Here it is:

Flower Fairy (final)

If you remember, I started with this:

Flower Fairy (in ink)

I’ll leave it up to you guys to decide if the final image is better. The background is done in watercolours, the fairy’s colour was done, first by copying with my lightbox, then using grey markers and ink brush and then on the computer I used gimp to colour her. I only have a mouse, not a tablet to do work on the computer. Because of the limitations of using a mouse, I couldn’t finish the fairy character how I liked. I would have liked to strengthen her outline, like the original image, but with a mouse the effort would have looked very flaky.

Here is an inset of just the Flower Fairy, to show you how the colouring came out:

Flower Fairy (final) (inset)

It’s certainly not going to used as an illustration anywhere, but I’m proud of it. I also learned a lot and the more you learn, the better the rest of you’re drawing skill improves.

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