I haven’t played the sequel to my favorite Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy Tactics, in ages. And even when I played it before, back in the Gameboy Advance days, I never got that far into it – the tiny screen just didn’t work for JRPGs for me. So I spent a lot of money getting a Nintendo DS – the one with the GBA slot – and a complete copy of the game, and decided to give it another shot. ...
It was an obsession, it was a challenge, it was a lesson. The Advent of Code is an annual coding event that runs from the first to the twenty-fifth of December, but instead of chocolate treats, this advent calendar delivers delicious daily coding puzzles… although you don’t necessarily need to code to solve them. (The header image is from the Python Discord.) My family thinks I was insane for doing this. And toward the end, I pretty much agreed with them. The last weekend was grueling, and I spent most of the last weekend before Christmas trying to solve particularly twisty puzzles. A lot of people dropped off at that point. ...
Is there a vinyl album out there that would spur you to buy a record player? I thought I’d never do it, until that one album came along. When I moved from California back to New England, I was bound and determined to take nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Anything I didn’t need – set out by the apartment dumpsters, hoping they would find new homes. I hadn’t had a record player for a long time, but I’d still been lugging around my old vinyl albums from place to place for sentimental reasons. Complete Floyd collection. Local Monterey bands. Those old Ian Dury EPs. A bunch of prog rock. I hoped whoever took them would get some enjoyment from them, maybe discover a new band or two. ...
Creating portraits with artflow.ai? Old news. Creating abstract fantasy paintings with wombo.art – now we’re talking. Wombo is already pretty well-known for their AI powered lip sync app that turns a selfie into a meme. (Although, I wonder what would happen if I piped artflow into wombo… LATER: IT WORKS!) How long until we don’t know what’s real any more? Anyway, the lip sync app is “wombo.ai”. Wombo’s new app is “wombo.art”, and generates random art based on prompts you type in, and an optional selection of an art style, which range from “synthwave” to “dark fantasy” and many points between. ...
The swamp biome was already Valheim’s deadliest, in my opinion. A new “stirring in the mist” just made it a little bit deadlier – but also brought some new rewards. The Valheim devs were coy about just what was new in the swamps after the latest update, but I’m here to spoil it for you. Start right with the feature image up top: That’s the new mob, the “Abomination”, a creature made of wood and spite – probably related in some way to the gray dwarfs, who are also mostly wood. ...
Our Jaws of the Lion campaign continues. We’re nearing the end, and all of our characters have gotten their late game power ups. We’re clearing out our quest log before heading to the end game. The header image is a spoiler, by the way. I’d be concerned if I thought anyone who would ever care would read this :-) I’d put off painting the contents of the secret character boxes until everyone had unlocked theirs, but with Ally finally unlocking her mech, I couldn’t put it off any longer. ...
So, there, it’s done. 62 hours and 22 minutes from the start to the end of the game, LucasArt’s near forgotten cinematic tactical strategy gladiatorial combat RPG defied all my expectations. The last time I blogged about Gladius, I’d just left Imperia for the Windward Steppes. That gave us the last group member, Eiji, an archer, who was more than she first appeared. But who didn’t know that? Continuing on to the Southern Expanse brought us a cutscene where one of the many evil villains dogging our steps said she would be sending someone to us who would bring us right to her, followed by a new character joining us immediately afterward. ...
Not necessarily in that order. I have a lot to talk about and I just have to put it down in the blog, and I guarantee both joy and brain melting. I’ll talk about the NFT and crypto stuff later. I know I promised I was done with it, but the world isn’t done with it so… here we are but who cares about that because FREE REALMS? IS COMING BACK??? FR Sunrise log in page ...
After adding another hero and a minotaur to their motley crew, the Viking twins conquer the fighting pits of Imperia and set their sights windward. I just spent an hour writing a shell script to take the PNG files that PCSX2 generates for screenshots into resized, blog-friendly JPG files. I do and do and do for you all :-) (…and now I just rewrote it in Python) (…and now I asked GitHub Copilot to rewrite it for me, which it did.) (and now I just rearranged my Github folders). ...
It’s at artflow.ai – you type in a description of the portrait you want, and out comes a portrait of someone who never was. The featured is what displayed when I asked for “She Hulk”… I have Lum to blame for this. He started tweeting amazing looking portraits created with this tool and I just had to see what I could make with it… Some more AI portraits I have to admit, I really want to hear what old Jimi Hendrix is playing. ...