General

So, thanks to Stargrace at MMOQuests.com and Peter at Dragonchasers.com for their kind words :) “This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.” Not sure this blog qualifies, but, hey :) Rules follow. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real. ...

Announcing the XFire Stats Wordpress Plugin. This plugin adds a widget that you can place on the sidebar of your Wordpress blog to show your gaming stats for the past week – the title and time spent, sorted by decreasing time. This is the very first release of this, my very first plugin, and feedback is definitely encouraged. To install: Right click on this link and choose “Save Link As…” and name it ‘xfirestats.zip’. ...

… if I could draw your attention to your right, especially you Wordpress bloggers … I’ve written a Wordpress Widget that shows your gaming (via XFire) for the past week. It still has one or two bugs issues challenges before I can release it publicly, but if anyone has any ideas of what they would like to see in such a widget, like sorting, or yes for times/no times, or live information or whatever… let me know.

There’s plenty of free books on the internet. Current ones, too, and legally. Project Gutenberg has an extensive library of free, public domain (or merely out of copyright) works that are easily transferred and read on the reader. Sony’s gone and trumped all this by making a deal with Google whereas all the public domain books scanned as part of their controversial Google Book Search program – are now available for the Sony PRS 505 and 700 Readers. ...

May 22, 2009, Spinal Tap “Unwigged” is coming to the Foxwoods Casino, one the of the two Indian resort casinos here in Connecticut. This is Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer as … themselves … and they’ll also be playing some of their songs from “A Mighty Wind”. Grrr. Ever since I moved to Connecticut, I had promised myself I was never going to support gambling by going down to Foxwood or Mohegan Sun (the other one) and seeing one of their incredibly overpriced acts. ...

Okay, Stargrace tagged me with a meme to post the sixth screenshot from the sixth subfolder of my saved screenshots. So that’s what I’m gonna do. All my file names are actually a hash code I made so I wouldn’t keep duplicate pictures so honestly, I don’t know what picture is gonna show here. This is from my EQ Classic folder, and shows us in a Hate raid, before it was made into an xp zone. ...

Based on last week’s run-through of the very bare beginnings of still-very-fluid Twitter RPG, I rewrote the entire thing from scratch. It has very solid underpinnings now. The timeline loop – rock solid. Fights with multiple monsters and players worked fine, though it was somewhat chaotic and I was having trouble keeping track of every actor’s health without the handy visual aid of health bars to keep me informed. The first issue? The game was TOO FAST. Seriously. I had to keep slowing it down, finally slowing it to a twentieth of its initial speed, so that someone following the fight on Twitter wouldn’t have to keep refreshing their Twitter client to see it. The rate the fight progresses should be about the same rate a Twitter client would refresh. ...

I was just sitting around, waiting for a spot on the Trakanon raid to open, and I got to thinking, hmm… I should write that Twitter-based RPG I’ve been talking about. So last night and this morning, that’s what I did. Players can enter the game and whack on a mob until one of them dies. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, and it isn’t, but right now, it’s all about getting the basics done, get something working – anything, really – as quickly as possible, so I can see how to move things forward. All about the iterative game programming style, right? Make it fun, then add new stuff, make it fun some more, etc. ...

I was inspired by a tweet from Red Headed Tim this morning to think about what a Twitter roleplaying game might look like. Twitter, for those new to it, is, famously, “short messages continually answering the question, ‘What are you doing?’”. If that sounds only marginally interesting, I agree. What Twitter REALLY is, is a party with little clumps of conversation going on everywhere. You can listen in on friends talking, join in, or just walk around getting little nuggets from people here and there, occasionally adding some thoughts of your own. ...

I love the whole concept of using Google Reader to custom tailor my news, but it has just gotten to be too much. I found what I really looked forward to was new blog postings from my friends, and I would scroll through the blogs on the side looking for their updates first. I have no time to read all the entries; it was over 500 this morning. So I have clipped most of the pro blogs, like BoingBoing, Wired, Slashdot, Tor and so on, not because I don’t like them, but just because I can’t keep up. ...