April 2005

Jonathan Coulton's MP3s

A lot of the music I listen to nowadays comes from indiefeed, which exposes me to several genres of decent music that most people have never heard of.

The first of Mr. Coulton's songs that got sent my way was "Ikea," and I was immediately struck with combination of the fanciful Weird Al/They Might Be Giants style lyrics and the lack of a nasal singing voice. When I heard his song "Mandelbrot Set" and liked that as well I knew I had to visit his web site.

Jonathan Coulton has several albums you can buy, but if you're operating on a tight budget you can at least download some of his songs for free. At the very least you should do that and, if you like his stuff, pass the link on to someone else.

A.O.T.M. 28 - The Crane (.mov)

Name: The Crane
Length: 1:53
Size: 4.4 MB
When: 2004
CD Available?: No

This movie continues the goofyness of the last two A.T.O.M. postings, but this time I included some actual video rather than using all stills. I'd wanted to do something with origami for a while, and I finally got around to it here.

If the music sounds familliar, it's because it's that "Ominous" .mp3 I posted before.

Pipe Dreams

I'm sitting here waiting for Kelli to finish dialysis, so I have a little time on my hands. I'm making good use of it by working on that card game Paul and I are designing. Our current card total is 189 for the core set, and we feel we'll be ready for playtesting when we hit 250.

I keep thinking back to when we first came up with this idea and I was puttering away, trying to make all these cards in AppleWorks. (Now I'm using Photoshop Elements and it's much nicer.) We spent just as much time trying to figure out the rules as we did making cards, and both changed a lot.

Our concept of the game has changed a bit over the years. I remember in the beginning the core idea (for me) was to create a game that could be 100% free and downloadable. I still want the majority of the core set to be distributable that way, but Paul is making some valid arguments for charging a small fee for the cards. Expansion sets are a different story. Assuming the game becomes popular, we'll be charging for those - especially if we include material or characters copyrighted by others, since we'd be paying royalty fees.

-=-=-=-=-=-

The other day when visiting Jim and Julie in Reading we spent some time talking about gaming shops. (I'd just recently taken my first trip to Adventure Games in Scranton, a trip I had thouroughly enjoyed.) Jim and I started talking about what products we would use to stock the shelves if we actually owned our own store.

Then the scary part started. You see, Jim is a computer guru who also does taxes. He started talking about how such a business could actually be set up and where it's optimal location would be. For a breif moment we went from whistully describing our ideal store to taking giant leaps towards taking out a small business loan.

Of course I already have student loans of my own to worry about and Jim has mortgage payments so nothing will come from this ... yet.

But still ... that would be so cool.

A.O.T.M. 27 - The Fountain (.mov)

Name: The Fountain
Length: 1:19
Size: 3.1 MB
When: 2004
CD Available?: No

I made this under the same circumstances as the Stairs animation, but now that I knew that I could do it I added a little image editing into the mix. I have to say that when I show portions of my animations to my students they enjoy the ending to this one the most.

A.O.T.M. 26 - Stairs.mov

Name: stairs.mov
Length: 0:32
Size: 1.9 MB
When: 2004
CD Available?: No

Over a year ago I was alone late at night in a hospital (my wife was sick and visiting hours were over), unable to sleep but having access to a digital camera and a laptop, I created this short little movie.

I started off simply taking a picture then moving too steps forward, and the whole thing progressed from there. It gets a little choppy near the top of the stairs (that's 8 flights, by the way ...) but I still like how everything turned out.

Update - Fear the pretzel!

Looks like Kim updated her quote list within 24 hours of me posting. Yeah, I'm also called "Spiffy." What can I say? It's an old college moniker that stuck.

Moratorium on Death and Other Quips

Well we're home from visiting friends & family in Pennsylvania, and a good time was had by all. We spent most of the time at Kelli's Dad's house, although we did have a nice time visiting Gretchen for Easter along with the rest of my family, hanging out with Jim, Julie, their daughter Joanne, & Susie in Reading (I got to hear gunshots and get my butt kicked at Magic: The Gathering) and as an extra bonus, I took a drive to Scranton to hang out with my old college roommate.

Hanging out with Paul was a blast. Apparently the local shop called Adventure Games that is a popular hangout for freaks like us. Naturally we spent some time pummeling each other with our M:TG decks, but we also played a session of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Role Playing Game. That's right, I played a game with the word "Buffy" in it, and had fun doing it. As corny as the original movie was, the TV series made good fodder for an RPG and the rules were quite easy to manage.

During our trips to AG Paul got to introduce me to a variety of interesting people, including a potential play-tester for a CCG we're developing and someone who prommised to put the quotes from our Buffy game online, although I don't see them there yet. (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.)

I don't remember if I discussed our CCG yet, but since I'm procrastinating writing my lesson plans I might as well say something about it now.

It all started two years or so ago when Paul and I were discussing the high price of CCGs. Long story short, we decided we could create our own CCG, so we've been doing just that. We've had some setbacks along the way, but our core set is almost ready for playtesting.

I'll write more about that when we've made more progress.