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The RPG Blog Alliance

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 30 May 2011 09:30:48 +0000

So last week, I added my blog (well the roleplaying related posts at least) and my lost heroes dev blog to “RPG Blog Alliance”.

I saw a number of fellow bloggers/twitters joining up and thought I’d be in good company. But as of writing, it’s up to 131 members. That’s 131 blogs about roleplaying. 131 active blogs about roleplaying.

The feed is syndicated to twitter via @RPGBlogAlliance. And now my feed is constantly filled with new blog posts about roleplaying, from learning to GM to geomorph tiles to development blogs of new games. New content, all the feck’in time!

And there was me lamenting the decline of the roleplaying hobby. In just the last week, it’s gone from a manageable list of blog posts that I can read to avalanche of information I can’t digest in a timely manner, or at least before the next blog post comes in. That’s quite cool.

Initial feelings on Diaspora and identi.ca

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:58:19 +0000

I was planning on writing a post on why Twitter rocks (I may still write that post), but then Twitter do this dick move: moving to ban 3rd party clients that replicate the twitter stream. The news has been covered all over the place in the last few days but the real ramifications are not yet known. A few twitter users I follow are looking to what’s next, in case people start leaving Twitter on mass. No-body I know has stopped using twitter (yet) that I know of but I’d like to be setup that people can find me on other networks as such, so I don’t miss the boat.

So what’s the alternative to Twitter. It seems to be only identi.ca at the moment which is built on open-source software StatusNet (there is also status.net but they are only accepting invites at the moment). I registered on identi.ca in 2009 but I didn’t find many folks to follow. Most are either on Facebook or Twitter then and now. And going back to it this week, it’s not that much changed in terms of feel though.

The nice thing about identi.ca is that you can post there and have it posted it to twitter.com. So you can start using it without leaving twitter. It even has a neat integration using an IM client. You can use, for example, GoogleTalk and get your identi.ca stream and post/reply there. I use Pidgin to access twitter and googletalk so it’s pretty easy to integrate it. Also, 3rd party clients will never be banned from using and presenting micro-blog updates from StatusNet.

So a few people I know started using it and I was able see how it felt in use. What I noticed first off was that with identi.ca is that you see all posts from some you follow, including their “@” replies to users you don’t follow (not so on twitter). It can make it a bit noisy, but it does offer the opportunity to get involved in that discussion as identi.ca keeps the context or thread of the conversation. It supports hashtags and it also has Groups that you can leave and join – a feature I thought was missing from twitter.

Even though identi.ca easily integrates with any IM client (if a little temperamental) and cross-posts to twitter, it gets a bit confusing carrying on conversations across two services. While identi.ca will work with twitter, twitter won’t work with identi.ca or any StatusNet service. StatusNet does allow you to follow someone on a different service using StatusNet (apparently, I haven’t tried it), twitter will never allow that.

All this discussion about alternatives to twitter landed me an invite to Diaspora. Which I must say I like. It’s a bit empty now, everyone is still on Facebook and Twitter, but it has promise. It’s open-source, with privacy at the core of it. I’ve never felt comfortable having work people on my Facebook, but I would with Diaspora as it. It has a neat concept of “Aspects” that use to group your friends into. You can also download all your info and, theoretically, move it to another “Pod” (another service running Diaspora) or even run your own Diaspora and still be able to follow and share with all your friends. Of course, it’s still in development and it’s missing features, but the clean interface is much more inviting than Facebook’s crammed streams and ads.

For those that care, I’m on twitter with the username thedeadone, on identi.ca with the same username and I can be found on diaspora with the same username (lucky me!).

The RPG Blog Alliance

Forgetting about it and moving on!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:37:15 +0000

You probably don’t know this about me, you probably don’t care, but I don’t like gangster movies. I’m not saying I think gangster movies are bad movies at all and I really shouldn’t have to say that either. It’s just my simple opinion, which is generally meaningless in the sea of opinionated blogs.

Now if I said I’ve never watched the Godfather and really am not bother to do so, what do you think now? I mean, I said I don’t like gangster movies, but now we’re talking about the Godfather. A modern classic. I said I didn’t like gangster movies, I’m not interested in them. You probably think I’m weird but hope you would leave at that. My tastes do not mean the Godfather is a bad movie, I suspect it’s great movie. And certainly Francis Ford Coppola wouldn’t give a crap about my online opinion. (BTW I loved Apocalypse Now).

I generally try to keep the inflammatory stuff to a minimum, I don’t have the energy to exercise on flames and trolls and it does tend to burn my sanity. And if possible, forget about it and move on. Patrick of SinisterForces blog decided to post about it and forget that way. Each to his own. But which provoked me to write this post…

Part of what he’s complaining about was because of the reaction his blog post and my comment on it caused. Both of us were just sharing our tastes, not criticising any particular product or the people who make them. I think Patrick got the brunt of the mini-twitter-shit-storm, simply because he was online at the time. I was sick in bed and only got it hours later, where it seemed to have already burned itself out. I made the mistake of reading back through it when I did get back online and it didn’t make me happy. Normally I just “walk away” as defending or justifying yourself and throwing accusations only makes the matter worse and lowers you. And really, in the big picture, it’s only a blip. But it’s hard to hold back or divert the web-fury anger that this sort of thing creates.

All I can say is, please remember that the internet is a public place and saying something in a public forum like a blog or the comments on a blog, or on twitter etc. can be read by anyone. I’ve certainly learned this, because I thought only Patrick and few others would have read my comment. It again has re-enforced the idea that you have to be careful what you say. I don’t hold anyone to blame or have any grudges against anyone (and hope the same is true of anyone that knows me). But sadly, it adds a few things to the list of things I won’t enter into discussion of when online. In the end it’s destructive to the (roleplaying) hobby.

(For those who need a little context, here is the original blog post on sinisterforces.com, my comment is still there for the moment: Why Haven’t I Bought The Dresden Files RPG Yet?).

Roleplaying Design versus Facebook versus Twitter versus Buzz, eh?

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:23:16 +0000

For some reason I was thinking about the differences between Facebook and Twitter but within the scope of designing a roleplaying game. Yea, odd connections I know. That’s how my brain works and why I’m pretty much a scatter brain about things.

When designing or modifying a roleplaying system (for pen-and-paper here like DnD, not computer games), there are two levels. First is designing a game that’s playable, the second level is designing an experience. For example White Wolf’s Vampire games try to model and hence allow the players experience the Vampires’ losing grip on their humanity, via the humanity (WOD1.0) or morality trait. We insert restrictions and limitations into the system to help better focus the player’s experience and fun. Individual GMs and player groups additionally apply their own restrictions (to better focus the story-experience they want to use). Sometimes players grumble but most of the time it’s accepted and even seen as good.

With software and particularly social media websites, we look at features. What features does it have. Facebook has it all: status updates, photos, link sharing, privacy settings (debatable), filtering, “likes”, and so on. Twitter has a very small, strict subset of features: status updates, following, minimal privacy settings… But where Twitter wins out is the experience. And it does this, like in roleplaying game design, by inserting restrictions.

The big thing: 140 characters. Sometimes I use two tweets to say something, but I try to avoid that. If you can’t say it in 140 characters, post it somewhere else and link, or don’t post at all (it’s probably not worth it anyway). By restricting a tweet to 140 characters, you avoid over long and often boring posts but it also improves readership. Most people now skim through headlines or titles of posts in RSS/News Readers… but if the headlines are the posts, aren’t you skimming it by reading the full content?

I also love the way replies work compared to Facebook’s or even traditional commenting systems. You only see replies from people you follow. It allows conversations to generate as people see only people they know engaged in the discussion. I find reading comments from people I don’t know on a Facebook post on someone I only half know, annoying, in fact a bit of disincentive to comment. Or when you see a post from a band or a group and it already has 114 comments… why would I bother when my comment will be lost in the sea of existing comments. But if you feel (not necessarily think) that you’re first to reply, you’ll probably will then and if you see only your friends reply, you may reply or even reply to your friends. It’s restriction created by the interface but helps focus and improve the experience, much like explicit limitations of roleplaying games.

Which is why I think I don’t like Buzz (there goes my scatter brain making links out of no where). Leaving aside the privacy issues of Google Buzz’s launch, the second mistake was importing all your other feeds associated in some way with your Google account. Twitter works because of it’s restrictions, importing it into Buzz, it falls over. You lose all the wonderful reply experiences I describe above and copy over the disincentives of Facebook. It doesn’t even format them very well, long ‘RTs’ are cut off at the end. It’s not as obvious now because Buzz, at least among my circle of contacts, isn’t as busy or full as Facebook yet. Yet Buzz isn’t even as feature rich as Facebook, so it doesn’t even have that going for it. While I don’t mind using a single Google account to manage my Google Analytics for my websites, my email, my Google Reader, etc. importing all that into a single “social media” stream seems a bit creepy because I may not want them all publically associated with one person and there isn’t enough ways to control it. You either import you’re entire website feed, or twitter feed, or not at all. At least with Facebook there are apps that you can use to selectively import website posts and twitter feeds.

And even with what Buzz does import, the layout is strange. Buzz is trying to overlay a traditional but nice and clean interface over interfaces that work because they are non-traditional.

In my simple and uninformed opinion, Buzz should have been part of Google Reader, which already has social features I use (sharing items with friends with comments and likes). It shouldn’t have tried to auto-populate itself by importing all your other feeds or all your email contacts. It should have focused on figuring out how to improve the experience, even by restricting what it does. Shows us our friends in a different way.

Okay, that’s my ramble over for today.

Review part 1 of my Custom Dice

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:02:34 +0000

As part of winning these custom dice, I have to do a review of them. However I haven’t gamed in months, certainly not since I received the dice. So instead I’m doing a “part 1” of the review now, which is, in a sense, a bit weird as it’s my design on the dice! Part 2 will come when I actually get to game.

My Fudge Dice

So in lieu of not actually gaming with them, I grabbed my big bag of dice and compared them to my other fudge dice. I bought a set of 16 dice from Grey Ghosts years ago. Comparing them physically the dice are all the same size. Of course my new dice are printed rather than engraved like my current fudge dice. Just rolling them randomly on the table together I notice no difference in them.

Visually there is certainly no problem in picking out pluses and minus when you roll a bunch together. In fact I think it’s easier, the pluses and minuses on the printed dice are bigger, check out the slightly fuzzy photo below:

I think though that my little Cthulhu icon on the blank side feels quite contracted on the dice compared to the other sides. But that may be an artefact of the design more so than the dice itself. However the quality of the print is impressive. The detail is quite vivid (though you may not be able to tell from my bad photography).

The original design, in case you've forgotten!

Certainly if you wanted to get some icon on a dice, this would be a be a great way to do it.

I’ve rubbed them and rolled them, and so far, none of the print has come off. So it seems quite sturdy. I have been keeping them in my big bag of dice these last few months and no damage to the print at all from being tossed about.

Overall I’m quite happy with them, hopefully they’ll prove to be my “lucky” dice. I think they’ll be kina cool too if I go to cons with them, though I’m generally not big into showing off my geek status. I managed to meet up with my roleplaying group and showed them the dice, which got a good “ah cool!” from everyone. So that’s a decent objective measure there.

thedeadone gaming dice?

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:01:13 +0000

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!

The answer to my question: WordPress “Press It” feature

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:40:50 +0000

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.

Okay, no more automated content here!

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:36:38 +0000

I never enjoy reading a blog post of someone’s tweets or what they shared on Google Reader. If I want to read your tweets, I’ll follow you on twitter. If I want to see your shared items, I’ll follow you on Google Reader right?

So I’ve disabled the auto-generated post of tweets and shared items and have scrubbed the existing ones from my database. A dead blog with automated posts looks worse than a dead blog right?

Going on holidays tomorrow! :)

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:20:31 +0000

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!

Learning to not drown in the sea of social networking

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 23 May 2009 09:40:46 +0000

I’ve finally converted. I’ve seen the light. I’ve jumped into those “whats the point?” and “timewasting” websites that have heralded in a multitude of buzzwords, Internet jokes and memes…

How the winds of fashion seemed to affect my friends

Yep. I’ve given in and followed my friends into Facebook and Twitter. A bit late in the game as people seem to be already not bothering with facebook and moving solely towards twitter. But as someone I know says, “people vote with their feet” (and yes, that’s meant to be footprints in the diagram).

None of the new platforms are perfect though and I have gripes with each, but they are all useful in their own ways. I’ve actually had a Facebook account for a while, connected with several old friends, sent “pokes” and started to get really annoyed by them and then quietly stopped using it.

How I currently use Social Networking sites

But then my wife joined Facebook. For her it’s a way to keep connected with her friends in France and the US, so I went back to Facebook and started to enjoy it, seeing some friends still actively using it. It’s great to be able to connect to them and being modern-day parents, it’s often hard to keep track of or in contact with friends.When you do make the effort it can sometimes feel forced. With Facebook there is a flow there that’s natural.

But even now, some of the more tech-forward people I know have moved to twitter, ditching facebook in the process. I’ve been playing with twitter for a week now and I can see it’s fun, though Facebook’s status updates and News Feed have a very similar feel to Twitters feed.

So I’m playing an experiment, Facebook to connect to friends and Twitter to connect to everyone (follow @thedeadone). If you want to know how it’s going, then you know what to do.

And no, I’m not deserting blogging.

thedeadone.net » twitter

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