Blogs that don’t fit anywhere else.
He just keeps coming back for more. Yes, my D&D group had a gap between adventures so, once again, muggins here foolishly volunteered to run a short “dungeon”.
The first time I ran an adventure was hard work, but I think my second, far more scope-limited, single-session attempt went pretty well! So I doubled down on the principles of the latter and prepared a… two-shot. Which ended up as a three-shot. Oops.
Continue reading “Blog 885: “I’m Never Being Dungeon Master Again,” he said”
I used to burn a lot of stuff to CD-Rs. Back in the day, it seemed like a reasonable way to keep stuff safe for… well, ever. Joke’s on me — burned CD-Rs have about a 20-year lifespan and, yes indeed, we are approaching that cut-off. I figured it was time to rescue what could be rescued and transfer everything to more reliable external hard drives. (Whether or not any of this junk is worth saving is another matter entirely.)
And then I discovered a whole heap of Lego stop-motion movies I had totally forgotten about. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Blog 861: Robbie Enterprises Movie Company 2”
When I was a teenager in secondary school, before I’d been suckered into Warcraft III modding, I dabbled in stop motion animation. I got Lego MindStorms not long after our first family PC, and maybe a year or two later, the Vision Command expansion pack. The LegoCam was just a Logitech QuickCam in sheep’s clothing, but since that clothing had proper, official Lego studs and was perfectly-sized, you could build it securely into a model.
Eventually the world moved on. Driver support for the LegoCam ended and all that obsolete tech was relegated to the cupboard. Until…
My parents recently cleaned out their attic. I once again have a Windows XP computer. Can I make it any more obvious?
Continue reading “Blog 840: Robbie Enterprises Movie Company”
Managing old computers is hard; if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Last time, in order to fix blue-screen hard crashes in Starcraft and LEGO Rock Raiders, I got a very old graphics card, which required a very old motherboard (and a very old sound card, and some old RAM). Yes, a full rebuild.
The other week, I took a fancy to do a wee bit of Age of Empires II skirmishing… only to discover that it had started crashing on this build! Only to desktop, admittedly, but reliably and in a peculiar way suggestive of… other problems.
There was only one way this could end.
Continue reading “Blog 838: Third Build Lucky?”
Remember when I tried being Dungeon Master once, and swore that I’d never ever do it again because it was intensely stressful?
Apparently I lied, because we had a hiatus last week while our current DM went on holiday and I volunteered — VOLUNTEERED! — to run a one-shot to fill the gap.
They say “no D&D is better than bad D&D”, and yet…
Continue reading “Blog 834: One Shot”
My workplace recently started a scheme where they’d let total rando employees tell their “stories” through internal blog posts. Being the relentless shill and lover of blogging that I am, I reckoned that my story of bloody-minded solo game development was surely worth a pitch.
And they actually accepted! I’m quite pleased with the result, so I’m copy-pasting it here for posterity. So please, enjoy this more philosophical look at my journey from Warcraft III to Exon — but can you spot all the song references?
Continue reading “Blog 821: Everything Eventually”Eight hundred blog entries! My target is always about 1000 words per entry, so I’ve come even close to that average, that’s… a whole lotta words. I could have written a whole fantasy epic novel sequence instead! But writing novels takes a hell of a lot more effort than… organising your thoughts on a subject into a coherent and structured narrative… … Uh… shhhhhhhh!
Continue reading “Blog 800: Don’t Be Fooled By the Blogs That I Got”
I’ve been playing tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition) regularly for a couple of years now, with a small group of close friends. We started with one of our number running a big long campaign, then when we got to level 20 (and after I’d finally cajoled him into letting us fight the Tarrasque), the next started his big campaign. About half-way through the first, we took a small break to play the published adventure Dragonheist. During this second campaign it… fell to me to provide the interlude adventure.
Picture the scene: a man who has dedicated his life to spending years meticulously crafting scenarios hosting an infinitely-responsive adventure with only a week between sessions for planning.
, as the old saying goes.
Rao Dao Zao 