Just a reminder for my players, if you want to start at second level, do something to flesh out your character by tuesday night and you can start the game with 1000 XP. First session is on for this wednesday, Jenn works untill 5, so be here by 6 if you want to be in on dinner, hopefully the game can start shortly after that.

( In the mean time, here's some NPC's )

I showed Jenn how to play with the Gimp, and here's two images of how she coloured the ship, two of inspiration that I took, and one of hers that I modified. ( Behind the cut of course. )Anyone else want to play? If you have the Gimp I can give you the xcf, otherwise you can play with it here.

I spent some time yesterday evening and about half of today drawing a starship for the Star Wars game coming up. I drew it up in a drafting program and coloured it in a raster program, the best part being that they're both free. My renderings are pretty cartoon-looking, but I'm happy enough with them as a representation of the ship. ( Five large pics behind this cut )

I've just spent about 20 hours in the last two days fooling around in the Gimp, and I've gotten the images for the box finished. Starting on the right panel, the rebellion and empire images were taken from this site, and made that panel the easiest to make, which is why it was done first. The images on the left panel didn't have as many high-res resources to be found on google image search, so I had to fool around with making vector based traces of tiny gifs and blowing them up. These two panels were finished a few weeks ago, so yesterday afternoon I started the front panel. I'd already image searched the lightsaber handles, and it was just a question of erasing whatever was around them, whenever they weren't available as gifs with transparent backgrounds. Making lightsaber blades in the Gimp is tricky if you don't know what you're doing, fortunately this person does know what he's doing, and made a script for the Gimp which turns any selected area into a glowing blade lickety split.

Finally, the top image. The Star Wars logo was found as a screen cap of some kind with just hollow outlines of the letters. Upon closer inspection, when I started doing effects with the letters I noticed that the lines weren'e at right angles or straight. So I lay down some guide lines and made a vector drawing of the logo, filled it, and manipulated it into the bezeled gold chrome logo with supernova effect that it is now. It was actually easy once I knew what to do, but figuring out what I wanted and how to achieve it was tough, and I'm very proud with the result. The two fighters are actually toys, and I drew the contrails behind, again using vectors, and a gradient fill.

Lastly, I wasn't sure if I wanted a plain black background, or a starfield. These images started plain, but now that I have them with and without starfield, I think the extra texture makes the image look a lot more finished. Let me know what you guys think though, I'm interested to hear what other people think looks better.

The last eight hours or so have been spent building a template for the flat box pattern, which was time consuming because my computer was chugging with the image size. Once I've finally made up my mind which images to use (also whether or not to bother putting anything on the bottom, maybe Jenn and I in our costumes?), I can just paste them on to the template and get them printed.

Which reminds me, Derek, could you get me a quote if you're still at the copying/printing place? The image is 23"x24", 300dpi, and I want really heavy, glossy paper, 74 pound being around ideal.

Here's the two images:
( cut due to largeness, although they're approx. half the working size. )

So, now that I'm three dvds away from having all the Star Wars movies and tv shows ever made, I find myself wishing it were in a fancy boxed set. The obvious solution is to make my own box. I've already started doing some stuff in photoshop, and I need to talk to Derek about a price quote and what kind of sizes and weights of paper he could hook me up with (at least 20x32 inches at 300dpi, ideally 74 lb or higher, uncertain if it's possible...) In the mean time, as I work with cardboard and occasionally get bored while the machine is running and I've done all I can to finish the last set and prepare the next, I decided to make a little prototype.

( six large-ish pics behind this cut )

On sunday I got a call from my mom on my cell phone, so I called her back on my break. My grandfather had just died that morning. I know he wasn't doing well, not for the last several years. Long story short, he was epileptic, and the medications they used back in the day were pretty harsh, and prolonged exposure combined with what they had him on up untill recently gave him symptoms of alzheimers. Mercifully, he went peacefully in his sleep, at the end of a long life, with a large family, and I don't think anyone can honestly hope to do better than that, and wherever he is now, I'm sure he's with his wife again after over 20 years. He was a rock, peaceful and dependable, with a quick wit and a keen mind, of the card-counting variety. I remember being awed by him as a kid when I heard he had been escorted out of various casinos in Reno for winning too much.

Right away, I started recollecting the good times I'd had with him. I shared a few of them at his funeral on thursday, but this one I didn't mention, instead I saved it for my blog. For those of you who haven't caught on, I am a Lego fiend, and I have been since I was a kid. I remember one birthday (could have been christmas, but I'm pretty sure it was my birthday), Grandpa gave me this set:



I hadn't seen any grey space sets in the stores in a long while, and it knocked my socks off that he'd found one. To this day it remains one of my favourites of classic space. As I finished my shift on sunday, I decided to rebuild it in new colours as a tribute. I got Jenn to pick up a pie (Grandpa loved pies, especially lemon meringue with a cup of tea), and after desert that night I assembled this little vignette:



I call it Georgebot (click on the picture to see a small gallery of images). My grandpa was a blackjack player, and had a mind boggling hat collection. So here we see Georgebot, wearing his fanciest hat, with the ace of hearts on the table, and another card not yet flipped. Will it be a ten, or a face card? Will lady luck smile on Georgebot one last time and give him a blackjack? Is luck even a factor, or has he counted the deck again? Let's all wish him the best of luck anyway.

As a tribute to the man he was and the impact he had on my family's lives, a vignette is pretty pathetic. But as a whimsical tribute to the fun I had with him when I was younger, I think this works just fine. Rest in peace, Grandpa.

In order to familiarize myself with the GURPS combat system (and justify the expense of the battlemap Jenn and I bought last year), I decided to make some generic fighter type characters who could randomly battle each other in an arena. I made up the minifigs and arena obstacles months ago, but it was just last saturday that I finally finished making up stats for the four medievil characters, and today I finally took some pictures and put them up in a brickshelf gallery (click on the picture for a link). I'm not going to make stats for the four high-tech characters for a bit, because two of them need to have stats for their equiptment first. In the mean time, it should be all ready to play next time Jenn and I host tea. The idea is to make it kind of like Star Wars Epic Duels, and either do single or team combat. It will probably not play as quick untill I have the rules down a little firmer, but that's the point of the exercise. Once I know what I'm doing, I'll be better equipped to run a game. Here's the four available characters (based on 50 points each):

Archer: Fast character, proficient with wrestling and archery.

Dirk: Very fast, not very strong, knife fighter with a compulsion for risky behaviour.

Helmut: Generic sword and shield fighter.

Lumbering Jack: Slow, heavily armoured, strong berserker type.

So, like I said, anyone who wants to play, it will be set to go next time tea is at our place. And if certain "dubious" individuals have negative comments to make about GURPS stemming from barbershop singing, math nerd cheer-boys, don't bother, I've already heard it. ;p

I meant to post this about three weeks ago, so here it is at long last, my Coralskipper from the New Jedi Order series (for those of you who I didn't force to look at this at my birthday tea):



First, it doesn't look at all like the "official" version, because I think that one looks like a zombie's bruised nut-sack. Secondly, it's about half the size it should be to be minifig scale, but I always envisioned coralskippers as being smaller than x-wings and swarming all over the place, even though the books say the two fighters are about the same size. Aside from that I've got the volcano-like guns and mica-like canopy. The ship is supposed to be grown out of "yorik coral", so I used red and orange to give it a coral colour. I tried to make it a little organic by mottling the colours and making it slightly asymmetrical. When reading the books I pictured the dovin basal* as being at the front of the ship instead of the back, because it works on attraction instead of propulsion. When I was reading the books I imagined the dovin basal as being shaped like a big blue heart with red veins, but that was too hard to build, so here I've made it into a translucent, vein-coloured mushroom held onto the front of the craft by pincers. Click on the picture for a link to the brickshelf gallery, where I've also got a shot of two Yuzhan Vong warriors and Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin Solo.

*An organism that can manipulate gravity. It moves the ship by latching on to distant gravity wells, and can create miniature black holes to shield the ship.

Here's an idea I had at work the other day, inspired by those "cross two or more movies" type photoshop contests. Of course, photoshop costs too much so this was made using the Gimp. So I guess this wasn't "photoshopped" so much as "gimped". I find that more amusing anyway.

So without further ado:


Also, here's a larger version for those who want it:
http://www.maj.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=332333

I tried making lasagna using my dad's recipe last weekend. I modified it a little though, I substituted buffalo for beef, 200g of mushrooms for pork, 500g of ricotta cheese for cottage cheese, and added about a teaspoon of mexican hot sauce to the meat mixture. It turned out pretty good and was well recieved, although I found it to be a little dry. I couldn't find the right size can of crushed tomatoes, and ricotta is apparently denser than cottage cheese, so I only had about 2/3 of what I needed. So next time, maybe I'll just simmer the sauce for 45 minutes instead of an hour and use 750g of ricotta. Also there were too many noodles, so next time I'll just count out 16 instead of boiling up the whole pack.

Today I went out to Best Buy and bought some headphones and the Episode III soundtrack. Their online price for the CD was $14.99, but when I got to the store I found a sign that said it was $10.99. This was actually kind of annoying at first, because there weren't any copies under Star Wars in the soundtrack section of their CD's. I looked around though, and found it after a bit in a big Star Wars display. It comes with a free DVD, which is about 17 of the music tracks from all six movies, set to video clips from the films. They tell the abridged story of Anakin, and they all have neat little introductions from Ian McDiarmid (which you have the option of turning off). I actually found it to be really cool, and I think it may actually tide me over untill I can buy the really expensive box of all six movies.

I've been building some stuff for Rememberance Day with my Lego. I never know what to put up, last year it was the Life on Mars sets, my line of thinking that it's really juvenile of us as a species to imagine other sentient species and ask if they're "friend or foe" before we decide how to react to them. Maybe we should just be friendly in the first place in case that's what they're thinking. Of course, the point of alien species is to make us think about foreign cultures, and I still think that humanity as a whole needs to improve it's ability to tolerate and accept. Because war sucks. Okay, I'll stop trying to be philosophical now. So back to building. I made two tiny dioramas. First off, Flanders' Fields.

This is as you can no doubt tell, a really easy model. Nowhere near as big as it should be, but I don't have enough pieces (this model includes all of my red 1x1 round plates)

Next is Jenn and I kicking back and watching Fraggle Rock and He-Man, and generally enjoying the life we have.

Something I think about every Rememberance Day is the fact that my Grandfather on my Dad's side served in WW2. He was an orphan from Saskatchewan, and joined a highland regiment. My Grandmother grew up in Ireland, and served as a nurse, and that's how they met. If it weren't for the war, they wouldn't have met, my Dad wouldn't have been born, and I wouldn't exist. Kind of an egotistical way to appreciate the sacrifices of more men and women than I'll ever know, but at least I can be thankful for the life I have because of their sacrifices. That being said, I do believe that all wars are tragedies, and I can only hope that eventually we'll all grow up and put them behind us.

Anyways, here's the gallery, which will be up after moderation.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=153448

So I found something to do. I pulled out the two containers with all the minifig parts, and started messing around. The flame pieces were right beside the garbage cans, and I thought "Hey, if I put those flames in a can, it will be a trash fire!" Then I thought "and I can make a vignette out of it!" Vignettes are a fad on brickshelf right now, basically dioramas on a 6x6 or 8x8 stud base. So I got out the digital camera, signed up for a brickshelf account, and here's the result:



I also made some vignettes of my sigfigs, another fad which has mostly passed. Sigfigs, or significant figures, are minifigs meant to look like you or people you know. First off is a vignette of Jenn and I playing a D20 game, although we only have d20's and d6's. Note the GM's screen, and the books shoved off to the side:



If we were playing our D&D alter egos, Stelliophen and Jenna Longbottom, their first encounter would probably be pretty weak, seeing as they're 1st level non-heroic class halflings. I envision grubby goblins with sticks:



Alternatively, if we were playing the Star Wars D20 game as Steneph Bron and Jinren Frost, we might be talking to a couple New Republic pilots after a narrow escape from pirates:



I've got five pics in each folder, the folders will take some time to be available (brickshelf has to "moderate" them first, but I have no idea what that means):
Trash Fire: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=126389
Roleplaying: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=126393
D&D: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=126394
Star Wars: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=126396

The stupid thing is that I should be asleep now, but after doing nothing fun all day, I felt I had to do something before going to bed to make today worth while.