Any table top RPG player worth his or her salt has dice, more dice than one would possibly need. I remember buying totally pointless trap and weather dice, like you couldn’t just make a 1d6 die table for weather conditions. Whatever, it’s part of the hobby and it’s harmless fun.
But what the fuck? Why would one need a d12 that tells time… by showing the numbers 1-12 in analog clock form? Wouldn’t a regular d12 be just as good?
Way back in the day, we had an Apple II+. I think it was an Apple II+; it might have been an Apple IIe. Maybe someone can remind me. This would have been circa 1989 or 1990. The II+ was replaced by the IIe in 1982 and a few new features. To be honest, I’m pretty sure we had a IIe, and Tom had a II+. More on this later.
Ours had a monochrome green screen and two bulky separate 5.25″ floppy drives. Tom’s had a color screen; color back then was around 4 or 16 colors. We didn’t have a lot of games for this thing, or really any software for that matter. Mind you, this computer was already pretty outdated when we got our hands on it. I think my parents acquired it after the local school system (or community college where my dad worked) got rid of them. So it was already unwanted junk by an organization which traditionally is resource starved.
So games. We would have been 10–13 around that time and we naturally wanted games. We had this box of disks that we had copied off of someone my dad knew, but it was a mish-mash of stuff. There was a copy of Zork III, which we played a ton of and never got really anywhere. That’s all I really remember from that batch. Anyway, games. We wanted games. I remember being with my mom at the mall in Software Etc. looking at discount games. There wasn’t a lot of choice; the Apple II was pretty much dead at this point. We got a copy of Questron (or Questron 2) and Wasteland. I think they were in the couple dollar price range.
We played a lot of Wasteland. I remember sitting on the edge of Tom’s bed, each of us ‘controlling’ one character in the game during combat, being afraid of messing up and losing a party member, and generally not know what was going. A few moments stand out:
I played the game off and on after that time, through high school and even doing a long run through it freshman year in college. I even made a website for the game, way back in 1997–8.
Naturally, when Wasteland 2 had a Kickstarter, I backed it. I started playing it sometime last December. I haven’t made it all that far but I’ve really enjoyed it. It manages to capture a lot of the vibe and mechanics of the original while still being updated.
One particular example of staying true to Wasteland is the rocket use mechanic. If I recall correctly, ‘AT Weapon’ (Wasteland anti-tank weapon skill) and ‘Heavy Weapons’ (Wasteland 2 equivalent) aren’t the greatest skills. The reason being is that rockets were somewhat scarce, and the non-rocket weapons the skill controlled weren’t always that great and/or burned through a lot of ammo. So at least when I played, no one was particularly good at them. So rocket use was often unskilled. That was ok, because they did a shit ton of damage and at least in Wasteland 2, are area effect weapons. Still, accuracy left a bit to be desired. So you stockpiled and used them in ‘Oh shit’ moments as an act of desperation. Those ‘Oh shit’ moments helped heighten the excitement of the game for me as a kid, and play some part in how much the game stuck in my mind.
Anyway, the Apple II and the few games we had made a big impression on me. Wasteland (and Zork III) defined games for me in many ways, and I’m happy that Wasteland II captured a little bit of that.
Some years ago, the very end of 2010/beginning of 2011 to be exact, we filmed1
a sequel to H.P. Thomcraft. H.P. Thomcraft II was the incredibly original working title. Mike and I decided to ‘go big’ with HPT II (as I will refer to it from now on) and shoot it on 16mm film, with a Super 16 ARRI and a Zeiss lens2.
Not only were we going to shoot it on film, instead of just getting it converted to video and color corrected, we were going to get it scanned and get the raw frames delivered in DPX format3.
A couple weeks later, I got a drive in the mail with 270 gigabytes of files which contained our 20 minutes of raw footage. I posted some quick frame grabs to Protozoic 4 years ago, with the following text:
Here are a couple screen grabs from H.P. Thomcraft II. More soon.
Boy was that a lie.
The plan was for me to color correct the footage after Mike edited it using a process involving conforming the raw footage to the final edit using EDLs. If that sounds like a mouthful, it is. I eventually tested out the process and it seemed like it would work, though the color correction software, Color, had some stability issues. This was sometime around May 2011. I then waited for Mike to edit the footage.
Mike was pretty busy with things. I don’t recall with what, but it was some significant time before he got to editing together the short. So long that I forgot the process I had worked out. So long that the new version of OS X no longer supported Color, so I had to hold off updating OS X, which is the first time I had ever really done that.
I have an email from July 2012 from Mike stating that he was going to finish editing the footage soon. He finished a few weeks later. Around that time, I quit my job and moved to Ohio. I put off color correcting the footage because of that, and because I really wasn’t looking forward to trying to figure out the process again. Particularly since Mike had done a reasonably intricate cut with a lot of edits, which would make color correcting that more annoying. So I put it off for the rest of 2012. And 2013. I even managed to put it off all of 2014.
All through this time, I’ve held off updating OS X. I’m still on 10.7.5. I think OS X is on 10.10.2 now. That’s a lot of updates and it’s caused me no end of problems with a lot of my software. Moral of the story: Procrastination can have some unintended consequences. Don’t do it.
So I was talking to Mike this weekend that I should really get on it. I told him my worries about the complicated workflow we had planned and he said, “Color correct the raw footage. I’ll just re-edit it.” Well in that case… I had the raw footage all corrected a few hours later. We are in the process of transferring the 47 gigs of files over the internets as I write this. Mike thinks he’ll be able to edit it again in a couple of days, so H.P. Thomcraft II will actually get done shortly. I will take most of the blame for it’s incredible delay.
Maybe I can finally update my fucking computer now.
I’m not “old” yet, but I am getting older, and sometimes I feel it. I guess that’s the way it is for everyone.
That’s not the point of this post however. One way that I’ve been ‘feeling my age’ recently is how it relates to staying in shape. I used to be able to push myself pretty hard, running, lifting weights, etc. I could self-motivate pretty easily, with not much in the way of external feedback. Just go do it and work hard.
In recent years, I’ve noticed it’s been getting a lot harder to do that. Working a regular 9-5 (8-5?) and not having a gym right at work makes it a lot more difficult to stick with a workout and not skip or cut things short.
This was something I decided needs to be changed. I’ve always thought if you are having problems motivating yourself to workout, you should do one of two things. First is to try to find a source or two of motivation (duh). The second is to reduce the obstacles in your way that demotivate you. If it’s hard to get to the gym, work out at home.
I decided to apply this to my life by running more. As long as there isn’t ice on the ground, you can pretty much go out and run. One obstacle removed. The other aspect of it is to find a motivational tool to inspire me to push harder. It’s been a simple, but not cheap, thing. A lot of people run with their phones and use the GPS function. I never liked the idea of running with a big ass arm band and as a result, I had to pay a $200 penalty: a GPS watch.
The thing is pretty simple, but it keeps track of my pace, distance, and steps per minute. By becoming aware of these three metrics and no longer estimating how fast I was running, I shaved off about 2 minutes per mile on my pace, and pushed my distance up quite a bit. I’m happy to say I’m running close to the paces and distances I ran in high school, 20 years and 40 pounds ago. Which is to say, I can do about 2 miles in the time it used to take Mike to run 3.
About one year ago, I purchased an iPad. It’s been an amazing device. I read my news on it, read my email there, play games, and use it as a reference. I thought I would write blog posts, read books/pdfs, and create more with it. While I do some of the latter, it’s difficult at times. The iPad (and iOS) isn’t set up for content creation as I do it. I know that’s a bit of trope in the tech press: the iPad is for content consumption not creation. I think that it’s an unfair statement in general, but for me, it’s true.
I’m a big fan of internet services. So much so that I am willing to pay for them. While most of us use and love Dropbox, one service that I actually don’t pay for right now, I’m not here to write about that. I’m here to write about the services that many of us are unwilling to pay for. For what it’s worth, the following three services work well on mobile (iOS) and desktop.
Gmail rules the roost for most people. Even though I’ve had a Gmail account since the very early days1, before that time, I was paying for an email service for myself and Mike. Periodically, I overhaul my email setup.2. Recently I made another transition to Fastmail.
I can’t say enough positive things about Fastmail’s service. Unlimited domain names, aliases, plenty of options for aliases under Fastmail owned domain names, good filtering via sieve, and plenty of space. It doesn’t hurt that the webmail application is “not too shabby.”
Brian just recently made a large post about RSS. I love RSS as echoed during Brian’s post. I’ve been very happy with Feedbin as my RSS hub. It hooks into the apps I use, has good search and sharing options, and a responsive developer. I’ve used Feedbin for a couple of years now and I’ve loved it. RSS and email are my two most used services, so having a solid provider for them is advantageous.
I’ve used various home grown methods of bookmarking web pages and archiving online content that I wanted a permanent record of. I haven’t kept up with most of the methods because they ultimately took too much involvement on my part. That being said, I think Pinboard is going to work for me.
It’s fast, simple, and affordable. It fits my working style. I like the archive option too.
Mike tells me that protozoic is 10 years old. We’ve been online at this location for a full decade. We had other internet homes before this one, but this one is the longest running one. I think we first established our internet presence with the original Chook site, which was sometime around 1996 or 1997.
The first post here was made on September 15th, 2004. We posted a lot more then. Hopefully we will continue in the future.
Some time ago, over a year ago in fact, I wrote a post about how we were going to start playing some RPGs over teh internets. I’m happy to report that we’ve been playing pretty much every week via Roll20 since January 2013. Most of that time we’ve been playing D&D 3.5, but just recently we moved on and Mike is running a Star Frontiers campaign.
Back in that original post, I wrote:
It’s a pretty shitty adventure in many ways since there’s so little in the way
of a plot actually in the module. Unfortunately, not only due to my lack of
motivation to really make it good, my skills are a wee bit rusty.
So, yeah, that was pretty much spot on. It’s a shitty adventure. You basically hear some rumors about a cave and then you go to the cave and murder all the coexisting monsters that live there in separate cave complexes.
I think it is only a legendary adventure because it’s one of the first many people played. Probably a lot of fun campaigns were launched using the setting as well. It’s suckiness this time around is due in no small part to my shitty DMing. So it goes.
It’s a cool system, but it’s just too goddamn complicated, often for no good reason. There is a layer of realism added tactics-wise compared to ‘old school’ D&D, but I don’t really think it’s worth it. After all, most players optimize their characters and/or character play style so that they become pretty one dimensional. Who cares if there are attacks of opportunity if everyone just becomes a statue in order to avoid them. Likewise, characters with sneak attack or skirmish always do the same thing in battle to maximize their special ability. Likewise for most any other character class’s special ability.
I think I’d rather just go back to 1st or 2nd ed., keep most of the ‘options’ rules out of things, and wing it if someone wants to do a special maneuver. So, if Might & Magic ever ships, maybe we’ll play that next. Otherwise it’s vanilla 2nd ed. D&D or something like OSRIC.
I’ve talked about cast iron cookware before. I think it’s fantastic. For certain types of food (many types of food), it cooks fantastically, requires very little cleanup, and is incredibly durable and affordable.
Which leads me to my latest acquisition: the Lodge cast iron muffin pan. This is a curious item. I’m mainly writing this because there is not a lot of information about it outside of the reviews for it on Amazon. So I figured I’d put up my thoughts for others.
The short version: It’s a great pan which is incredibly easy to clean and turns out great muffins.
Briefly, the pan’s model number is L5P3. That’s what it says on the Lodge website, it’s what it says on Amazon, and it’s what it says on the info tag that came with the pan. It is not what bottom of the pan says. Cast into the bottom surface is ‘L5P2’. This was not a fluke; I bought a second one which looks exactly the same. I don’t know what the story is here—I’ve not written Lodge to get the deets.
Which leads me to the next topic. Many of the Amazon reviews claim that this is a small pan. It is. The muffin slots are pretty small. Not quite mini muffins, but not far off. I bought two because one was too small for a box of Jiffy muffins (corn or blueberry). I personally think a box of those is good for about 10 muffins of this size, so I bought a second pan and do 5 muffins in each. I’ve yet to adjust a homemade muffin recipe, not that I have one, to perfectly fit the two pans.
Between it’s weight and small size, there really isn’t a great place to grab the pan when it comes out of the oven. I’ve taken to using the empty sixth muffin slot as a place for my thumb to go when I grab it.
The pan is small and nests neatly with itself if you have multiples. It is heavy.
The first time I cooked with it, I made a mess. Then I figured out what to do. Of course you should do the normal light wash, dry, oil, and bake in the oven when you first get it.
I find I bake about 2 minutes less than what the box says in my oven. I’m sure all ovens are different, but remember the muffins get a quick start due to preheating of the pan.
With the preheating and buttering steps, the muffins literally drop out of the pan right out of the oven. Sometimes you need to nudge the top with your finger. Hardly any cleanup is required. For the buttering, I’ve dropped shavings into the hot pan and slid them around, but I prefer to just heat up a tiny bit in a mini cast iron skillet on the stovetop, and then brush it in the pans with a silicone brush. Since it’s just butter in the skillet, I just wipe it out with a paper towel and don’t really spend anytime cleaning it. The muffin pan only requires a tiny swipe with a sponge in the sink, then it’s dry, oil, and back into storage.
I’ll keep this brief. The bottom/sides of the muffins come out really nice and crispy, particularly if you brush a bit of butter in the preheated pan before you bake. Much better than standard muffins.
I also like the fact that they are smaller. It’s a good size to eat 1 or 2 and save some for later.
All in all, if you like cast iron and muffins, these are a cool purchase. A bit pricy, but not too bad. It can also double as a door stop, an implement of self defense, or anything else that a several pound weight would come in handy.
Al was getting on me for the way I pronounce the word wolf. Apparently I say it pretty similar to the way I pronounce woof. Somewhere deep inside my brain, I actually am trying to say the two words differently, and I think I actually do say wolf with a slight l sound that imperceptibly differentiates it from woof. But will grant her that it sounds pretty similar.
Joe brought up an interesting point. Wolves is not pronounced the same way. That word is more acceptable.
Somewhere around the time this conversation was going on, Taco Bell started advertising their breakfast menu a lot, along with some other new items. Al and I discussed that maybe we should check them out.
Then one night, I had a dream. I was in Taco Bell with Al, and I ordered a wolf taco. They had them on the menu. The wolf meat looked like chunks of beef. Al made fun of the way I said wolf. With that, the owner walked in.1 I asked him how you say wolf, figuring he would know, since his establishment was serving wolf meat. He said it like I said it. So there. I’m right.
Wolf tacos.