General

If you don’t read Order of the Stick, you’re just missing out on the best Pen and Paper gaming webcomic out there. Click on the comic for the full thing, or on the link to start from the beginning.

I Am A: True Neutral Human Wizard (6th Level) ** Ability Scores: Strength-10 Dexterity-10 Constitution-10 Intelligence-15 Wisdom-13 Charisma-**10 ** Alignment: True Neutral** A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.** ...

“Order of the Stick”, the web comic about characters living in a D&D world (and well aware of the rules that govern their lives), did a special tribute comic to Gary Gygax. Very touching :) Oh yeah, here’s Penny Arcade’s tribute.

Via Zen of Design, the sad news that Gary Gygax, the father of modern roleplaying games and the **co-**creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away. He gathered together the ideas in a dozen or more fantasy books and showed us all how we could live our own adventures in those worlds. The RPG and MMO industries owe him an incalculable debt. Without D&D, we’d all be doing something different right now. ...

I deleted a couple of inactive or entirely dead sites from my blog roll, and added several blogs I have in my feed but didn’t have here. If I forgot yours, let me know :P Typically I don’t link to gamer blogs that don’t have blog rolls, because I feel that puts a dead end in the little community we form by linking our blogs together. I usually wish people would link back for the same reason :) But it’s okay if you don’t want to for some reason. ...

I saw yesterday that a Swedish researcher at Umeå University VRlab had released the latest version of “Phun”. This is software that takes anything you can draw… and animates it with real world physics. This kind of reminds me of Crayon Physics, which does the physics, but makes it into a puzzle game. Phun gives you a blank screen and your mouse. What you do then is up to you. ...

There’s a boy out there, crying in shame because he cannot understand blogs. He needs all our help. His name is Daniel. And he cannot understand blogs. I couldn’t understand some parts of this article rana » EQ2: Nice while it lasted — Clan of Shadows declines the haffer, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting. He’s one of my biggest fans, and he reads everything I write, but there’s always some part of my post he can’t understand. He always promises to try harder, to do more research, but before he can finish, I write something new and it was all for nothing after all. ...

This just in: A fictional SF drama with ghosts, time displacement, smoke monsters, numerology, and psychics uses satellite phones not available in the real world. We now return you to CSI: Miami, where forensic pathologists using real-world techniques get a full color picture of a man by zooming in on the reflection on the eyeball of someone whose picture was snapped by an ATM machine.

It is that time of the week. I got your weekly recap right here: If Scurvsnicker plays 6 days every week, I guess I can call this a good deal. Many Xboxes have it a lot worse. Our gamerscore saw a 30 point boost which is good. Hey it’s only 1 achievement… what do you want? I was also pretty happy about the 2 new games this last week. They were (in no particular order) Rock Band, and Call of Duty 4. I liked them. I think Scurvsnicker did too. Also, I think we can all agree that Scurvsnicker was a FPS junky last week playing a ton of Call of Duty 4. She played it on 6 of the days. ...

First, a bit about LAST week. Playing for Keeps, the superhero podcast, came to a thunderous end last Thursday. If you’ve been hesitating to start it, wanting to wait until it was done, well, it’s done, so enjoy. Drew and I went to see Jumper Saturday. It doesn’t have much to do with the book. Among the things we don’t find out are: how people can have a high speed teleporting car race through the center of Tokyo without anyone noticing, what happened to the other Jumper, how many Jumpers are there, why don’t their paladins wear plate armor, why don’t you always make some false jumps to throw off the trail before making your final jump so psycho paladins with machines that can open the jump scars you leave can’t follow you, why don’t Jumpers get wealthy by “jump” starting a new business teleporting people and goods around (as the ‘jumpers’ in Kevin O’Donnell Jr.’s “McGill Feighan” books did). After awhile, the movie ends somewhere in the middle of the story. ...