1 hour ago
Angry Robot BooksiPhone Applications
Like my previous post on Firefox plugins, I thought it might be fun to post my most used iPhone applications. Feel free to leave a comment and add to the list. I’m leaving out some of the obvious ones like Amazon and Facebook.
Darkroom – I use the free version primarily for the “steady cam” feature.
CameraBag – Several prepackaged filter effects for modifying shots. I have examples in previous posts.
TiltShiftGen – I have lots of examples below. I have a blast with this filter.
Waze – Crowd sourced mapping and a meta game. Almost augmented reality.
Foursquare - Another meta game wrapped around checking in when you go somewhere. Offers the ability for users to provide tips on destinations.
Convertbot – Just a handy little tool with an awesome interface.
SketchBook – My preferred drawing / finger painting app.
Tweetie – My preferred Twitter client, but there are several good ones.
These are the apps I hit the most, I did not include any of the games I play or any of the many apps I bounce to once in a while. I am starting to use Tumblr on the phone a little though.
Hurtling Out of Control
Joani and I just watched the 2nd episode of Stargate Universe last night. We have not really talked about it much yet, but I am getting the feeling she is not impressed. The cast is not to bad, even if Lou Diamond Phillips is showing up once in a while. As is usual with a new show it takes about 4 or 5 episodes to tell if thing swill work or not so I am not going to go there yet.
I just realized after watching this episode how limited the creative bucket is again. Essentially we are getting another version of the Hurtling out of Control Trope. For me anyway this device was made famous by Lost in Space and Space 1999. Space 1999 fits the most closely because of the larger group dynamic. Technically it was the device in the original and to some extent the recent Battlestar Galactica shows, I’ll grant them the “Running for our Lives” variant. Another obvious spin is the “Fighting to get back Home” of Star Trek Voyager.
Ok, you get the idea, so lets return to the Hurtling out of Control. SGU and LiS are really pretty close the more you think about it.
- Dr. Zachary Smith = Dr. Nicholas Rush
- Will Robinson = Eli Wallace
- Judy Robinson = Cloe Armstrong
- Dr. John Robinson = Colonel Everett Young
- Penny Robinson = TBD
- Major Don West = Lieutenant Matthew Scott
- Maureen Robinson = TBD
- The Robot = Not Found Yet
Now the TBD roles up there are probably going to rotate out among the other crew/staff who are “not ready” for their situation. I am betting the Robot role will be filled somewhere mid season by an alien they pick up on one of their ship induced stops.
That is all I have on this right now, I may return later if the show makes it worth my time to continue watching. So far I am turned off on just the complete parallel they have taken with its development and that of the New versions of the Star Trek shows.
- Next Generation = Stargate
- Deep Space Nine = Stargate Atlantis
- Voyager = Stargate Universe
The new show is nice and pretty and it is keeping those CGI folks employed so it ain’t all bad.
Yet another business rant
Huntsville / Madison has a business called “The Technology Recycling Center” Great idea really and I am sure many cities around the country have similar establishments. I have not checked yet any of the surrounding cities but I hope they are more tuned in than ours. I had known about them for a while because a past employer used them to get rid of some outdated monitors. I was reminded of them at their booth at the TAC (Think that stands for Technology Awareness Conference) held recently on Redstone Arsenal for NASA. Their booth/table was essentially a place where a coupel of folks were available to talk and pass out fliers. I grabbed one, thinking I might find a use for them at some point.
Well last week I found a use. My secondary PC decided to take a dirt nap, it really only serves as a file server at this point, but not having my iTunes library and all my graphic files, etc available has been annoying. So last Saturday I jump on the web and do a search for “The Technology Recycling Center”. Best result I get is a yellow pages link and the google maps link to where they are. The place does not have a freakin webapge. They may recycle technology, but they sure as hell do not know how to use it. It is not like this place has not been around for a while, I know they have been there for at least 1 year probably more like 2 or 3. I grumble and figure, what the hell, I’ll run by. I was planning on getting out anyway.
So I run by knowing full well there is a chance they are not open. For the record I think this is possibly the dumbest move a retail business can make. Not maintaining some hours of operation on Saturday is like a big “kiss my ass” to anyone who maintains a 9 to 5 job for themselves. I am not going to take part of a day off from work to go visit a business. There is this thing called the internet and if I want something, and you place barriers between yourself and my money I will go elsewhere. You do not deserve my money, I refuse to work to give it to you. Not only were they not open, they had no posted hours on their door.
So today I finally got around to checking out the brochure I picked up from their table. It has an address and phone number for them. It also lists no hours of operation. They tout their services and how wonderful they are, heck according to them you could potentially outfit your whole office, including furniture from them. You just need to be lucky enough to find them open.
Mythic Design – Adventure Art Review
I pop twitter up on my iPhone periodically or on the PC if I am taking a break from something. I follow various game personalties and companies and saw a tweet from Mythic Design offering up a free copy of Adventure Art Issue #1 to the first few folks to respond, the only catch being those who won be willing to provide a short honest review. What follows is that review.
Adventure Art #1 is offered both as a print and a PDF, I am reviewing the PDF version and think for this type of produce, while it is nice there is a print version available, really works best as a PDF as you are granted permission to reproduce the art for personal use. The product is a collection of twelve character sketches with a bonus action sketch thrown in. It has a table of contents of sorts consisting of a very short intro for each character as well as the credits for the concept and art. Very handy way to make sure the creators get credit while keeping the utility of the character sketches clean. The quality of the art is above average to very good.
Other than being just fun to look through, for me, the best use for this around the game table would be a tool to spark ideas for a game master looking for help with NPC’s for his game. Players would gain the benefit of having a picture to place with the description the GM throws at them. Always nice to have a face to associate with in a game. All in all $6 for a PDF of printable clean character art is not too bad. Mythic Design has two issues out so far, give one of them a try.
WTF! A game getting dumped on because it is good.
This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever seen. The guy calls himself the “Game Anthropologist” So you know he already doesn’t get it. But another clue is he is trying to analyze a games community a mere two weeks after launch. But here are a couple of snippets from the article.
If you try WAR alone, it’ll feel lonelier than some other MMOs. For starters, grouping requires less communication, which enhances play time but lessens bonding or memory of other players. I’ve not yet added a single person to my friends list because it simply doesn’t enter into my mind.
Because WAR gives you multiple paths to level your characters, there’s no urgency to find someone you can rely on for a specific task—if a task is difficult, it is not an opportunity you regret skipping. Continuing to explore or saying “you know, I’d rather do something else instead, I don’t want to wait around” give the journey a different flavor.
He goes on later bemoan the lack of long waits for boat rides or flights from point a to point b. He pretty much complains about the lack of many things most gamers with brains have hated for 15 years in MMO’s. Pretty much what he seems to imply are negatives, most will find positives. In fact the commentors all took the review as a good one.
Ebay spirals away from usefulness
I really wish there was a place to buy and sell stuff on the net like the Ebay of 5 to 10 years ago. Ebay is now dominated by people and companies who market based of the “Buy it Now” model. Quite often they charge a semi reasonable price and a hellashisly unreasonable shipping charge. From what I hear they seem to be suffering, which is great. Several years ago they purchased Paypal who also ran under the “gee we are sorry you got screwed, we’ll just hold onto your money” method of business. So I can’t really feel bad for Ebay themselves, however I used to really enjoy listing and buying things on Ebay. It was a great way to sell stuff from my book and gaming collection and then turn that around to feed the same habit.I’ve also had decent luck getting rid of excess computer equipment and other odds and ends.
Craigs List is ok for looking for tools or motorcycles or weird personal listings, but since it is local, you are forced to deal with people face to face. While at times this can be fun, most times you are running around hunting for someones house hoping they are where they say they’ll be. Then there are the flakes who decide the other person they talked to who has not payed up deserves a second chance, even though you are ready to go. I guess since they are getting strung along, they feel it is cool to string you along too. (Recent fiasco trying to get some scaffolding of all things.)
I am going to give Ebay another try with a fairly rare RPG book I picked up at GenCon in 2000. The Dune RPG book, while very cool to have in my collection is just worth too damn much for me to keep on my shelf. It generally sells anywhere from $100 to $200 and I really have a gadget jones on for a couple of things. So we’ll see if this goes well. Currently there are a couple of copies up, but the people listing them obviously are not willing to let it go based on how they are posting their auctions. I’ll wait till those listings end, see if they sell or not and go from there.
Pathfinder 13 review .. sort of.
Paizo Publishing is a small company that publishes DnD adventures, a sort of journal/adventure anthology (called Pathfinder) and soon to release a revised ruleset for DnD 3.5 to keep that ball rolling in the wake of the debacle that was the 4th ed release and blunder with the new GSL. Wizards really screwed the pooch and what seems to be a good game with 4th ed. (Never mind they forgot to do any real play testing apparently) But enough of the recent history lesson.
The intention of this post, and hopefully 5 more in the future is to review the latest adventure path Paizo is publishing Second Darkness. Paizo started doing adventure paths back when they were publishing Dragon Magazine for Wizards until that plug was pulled to put Dungeon and Dragon magazines online. This is the 3rd 6 installment adventure path under the Pathfinder moniker, and I think they did 3 longer ones in Dungeon. You would think they would have it down by now, however this first installment, while based on a good idea fails on several points that make necessary for any DM to do some serious mods to keep it from completely feeling like a railroad to the players.
MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
The adventure (Shadow in the Sky) hinges on HUGE assumptions, that leave the DM screwed if the players do not allow themselves to be pushed and prodded in the right direction. Assumption: The players are going to all want to hang out in a gambling house, get involved when bandits/thugs show up and then take a job offered to them to continue working in the club. After they take or a coerced/convinced to follow along, the subsequent scenes assume your players are slightly shady and willing to be conviently gullable. To top that off, there is a giant mysterious cloud hovering over the city the adventure starts in, everyone in town is talking about it and the adventure as a whole essentially ignores it.
Most players I have DM’d for in the past have always assumed when a huge weird thing is presented to them they are going to becurious and funnel their attention toward that. The minute you try to move them away from that, they will feel the prod and lose interest in the sessions. The rest of the booklet is dedicated to support material. This is up to the expected Paizo standards. However this review is only concerned with the actuall adventure.
Overall this path has potential, the first adventure falls far short unfortunately.
Repost: Big Box Kick in the Nuts
Apparently I have a short memory. Yesterday (July 8th) I decided to go to Best Buy and pick up a copy of Civilization: Revolution for the xBox 360. No luck, not on the shelves and I did not bother to ask a sales tard. I just walked across teh street to Circuit City. CC is one of my last resort stops, they have actually gotten better but I still really hate going in there for some reason. No luck.
This time I asked the chick at the regester what was up, she checked the website from her terminal and it confirmed today was the release date, however the site also said “Not available for instore pickup” WTF, shrugged and walked out. Figured surely I could handle walking through one store for access to the GameStop in the mall. Walked in the overly cheerful and annoying rep there asked if she could help. “You bet” I said, do you have a copy of Civilization: Revolution ?”
“Nope, we will get that in tomorrow, we do not get releases on release day it usually takes an extra day or so because we are on the East Coast. Would you like to reserve a copy?”
I replied “Nope, thanks.” and walked out. Fairly pissed a confused by the whole experience.
Problems I see here are as follows in order of occurance.
You would think Brick and Mortar establishments would want to have things, new things in store for people to purchase. I could understand if they under ordered something like Civ, as it ain’t Halo or Rock Band 2, but this was just a case of BB and CC not even apparently intending on getting it in. I will not make this mistake again. Another bad experience I had was when Joani and I decided to get LotRO and start playing. They both had 50 bajillion copies of WoW but not ONE copy of LotRO.
As far as the experience of Game Stop goes. I think they just have a problem with deffinitions. Release day is not a few days around the time the product is supposed to be in stores, it is the day announced as release day. Having worked in both record and retail stores, we used to get shipments from our warehouses the day BEFORE the announced release or by 10 am on the release day. Big dog titles we searched the box for and had the ready to go, the 2nd string stuff we would shelve soon after. teh 2nd concept GameStop seems to have off a bit is that Huntsville, AL is on the East Coast, let alone that location should impact whether they get something on release day or not. My time in retail was both in Toledo, OH and Huntsville, AL and unless the Major distributors has a huge cock up, we got things on time.
I did not want to reserve a copy at their stupid store I would have to spend another hour round trip getting to and from after they had already pissed me off. I figured I would check Rhino at lunch today, if they had a copy fine. If not Amazon would get my money and I would have it by the weekend. Well GameStop got in a little jab because apparently they are now the proud owner of the former Rhino location, and they had a copy left of what has apparently been a suprisingly brisk selling title (Might be because the CC and BB don’t have it).
Oh and while I am at it, let me pick on the dorks at Barnes and Noble. They had a store sandwiched inbetween BB and CC. We have a new people àquarium theme park shopping extraviganza called Bridge Street that is around 5 away from their former location. They opened a newer bigger fancier, higher priced cherry position location there. At the old location, there are signs plastered all over with big red letters. The read °Thanks for shopping with us we are now Closed° and then in finer black magic marker it is scribbled in that they hav emoved to bridge street. The casual passer by might just think they have closed and move on. Their signage people should be shot. It is not like B and N does not move frequently. This same store has done it once before. A big WE HAVE MOVED is much more friendly than WE HAVE CLOSED.
I will go with my first instinct next time and just pre order the game from Amazon and get it without wasting gas, time and peace of mind.
Repost: Ravenor Trilogy Finished
Quite often fiction based on game or movie settings just are not that good. They seem to be churned out with a desire to pump them to the fans and not really hold much value, often not getting much more respect than romance novels. Once in a while you stumble on a book or series that suprises you. The “Ravenor” series written by Dan Abnett was one of those suprises for me. I had been wanting to give a book in the Warhammer 40,000 universe a try and Dan Abnett has written quite a few, so I figured it would be safe to give the first in the trillogy a chance.
Initially I was a little worried. The title character is a telepath, and the author pulls the cliche run down of minds as Ravenor scans the city looking for someone. Reading that just turns me off everytime I see it or anything similar used. Fortunatly it only happens, if I remember correctly once in this book and once in the last book of the trilogy. Other than that the books are just good dark SciFi/Fantasy fun. Good plots, decent villains, supporting characters you feel are worth knowing without spending too much unnecesary tiem learnign backstory for them.
Being a trilogy my 2nd fear was the 2nd book. No problems there and the 3rd book cleaned things up nicely. So I see no reason not to rate the whole group with a single rating.
Andromeda Strain
Strain indeed. I had high hopes for a remake of this film. Unfortunately the writer and directer butchered what used to be a fairly suspenseful technology thriller into a lame ass, poorly written, cliche filled two night joke. Of course they had to add a bunch of ham fisted references to Iraq, Homeland security, the current administration, etc. It seems that is the cool insider thing to do now, but this was worse than the episode of Star Trek called “The Way to Eden“.
At the end of the first night I essentially told Joani what the plot, including the upcoming weak twists on the original story would be. I hit nearly every mark. There was contradictory dialog Joani picked up on that I missed because by that time I had turned off my brain. In one breath a “scientist” says the virus can’t change its basic structure, in the next they show concern that the adapting, intelligent virus might surprise them with something new from its bag of tricks.
If you have seen the original you would remember the central shaft with the lasers that zap critters that escape into it. Well this time round there is a bunch of unexplainable falling junk and a deadly pool of I guess radioactive blue water at the bottom. Seemed to me like more bad Star Trek / Galaxy Quest “mashers” with the count down to 2 seconds at the end.
This is my first actual review, two out of seven.
