everburning

Well, 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons has been released. I’ve been waiting for this for a while now and had the box set on order from Amazon since February.

There are a lot of changes in this edition. We’ll have to give a play to determine which are good and which are bad. Some will be missed out of nostalgia I think. I liked rolling my hit points even though I rolled a lot of 1s. It made the leveling that much more unique.

But then, some of the changes make sense. In fact, I specifically said fuck, that just makes sense at least once. Which greatly confused Stacy to which I had to explain that 3.x D&D has the knowledges as specific skills where D&D 4 bundles the knowledge with the other skills.

I’ve also got a copy of Keep on the Shadowfell which I’ve been reading through and am hoping to run once I can gather a few of our group together.

So, Stacy is going to be away on my birthday. Well, not all of it, just most of it. She’ll be off partying it up in Montreal, or maybe working, I can never keep the two straight.

Since she’ll be away I managed to swing it to get my birthday present today. This, of course, required her to go shopping to purchase my birthday present. While this was happening I went and imagined all of the shiny things that could be extracted from the bowels of Toronto and brought up to our domain.

After a few hours of imagining dogs with bees in their mouths and sharks with lasers on their heads Stacy arrived home. Upon opening said gift I received a gift card for Henrys the camara shop. I’ve been talking about getting a Digital SLR camera for a while. Stacy, in some hang-over induced madness, at least, I have to assume that was the cause, figured I’d hold onto this card until christmas and get my parents to pitch in as part of a combined gift.

Now, for anyone that knows me, you’re probably thinking she was on crack. For anyone that doesn’t know me, I think she was on crack.

We proceded to hop the subway down to Henrys. Luckly they were open until 1800 hrs today so we got there in good time. The other part of the gift was a magazine profiling the top 10 cameras of 2007. This came in quite handy as I was able to quickly narrow my selection down to either the Canon Digital Rebel XTi or the Nikon D40x.

After talking with the sales guy, and from what I’d read in the magazine, I picked the Canon. The primary reason for this is that with the Canon the auto-focus mechanism is built into the camera. With the Nikon the auto-focus is built into the lense. To my mind this means the Nikon lenses will be more expensive as they need all the mechanics to deal with auto-focus built into them. As the sales guy pointed out there is a larger selection of lenses available for the Canon.

I must say, I’m loving this camera. It takes some really, really sweet photos. I need to go through them, I took a good number after charging the battery. There is a lot I need to learn about this, but, even as a complete SLR moron, I can still take some good snaps.

We went over to our friends Austin and Lori’s house on Saturday to do some St. Patty’s day drinking. While there we were taking a look at some stuff in their basement and I noticed Austins Warhammer figurines. He has a pretty good collection and they look really good all painted up.

Today I decided to try my hand at painting some. I don’t have any desire to play Warhammer at the moment, I just want to paint the little guys. I did a bit of painting many, many moons ago but haven’t done it in a long time.

So, I wandered up to the local gaming store this afternoon before going to read my book and picked up a few things. I got one Lord of Tzeentch that looks pretty difficult. He’s kinda my goal at the moment. To get started I picked up the Battle for Skull Pass Paint Set which comes with 10 Night Goblins.

I then sat down for about 3-4 hours and painted them. It takes quite a bit of concentration, and in my case, a good bit of touching up as I go along. I’ll have to admit, it’s pretty fun. You can see the final product taking shape as you go along. I get a bit obsessive and try to fix up as many of my little mistakes as I can, which just takes more time.

I think they came out pretty well. I’m also sure there are a lot of people that could do it better. I’m happy with the results. It was a good way to spend a few hours with an actual tangable thing that the end which is nice. I’m thinking I might go pickup another set, maybe dwarfs or something, to practices on next. Something to get me a bit more confidence before tackling the Lord.

As you may have noticed, I'm trying to get in the habit of updating this on a semi-regular basis (as opposed to my once every 1-3 month habit). We'll see how it goes.

Still working on everburning. I've got the quotes and the news sections done and could, and may, put them online. I'm currently working on the photo gallery which could be difficult depending on what I do. I still have to check that textdrive supports rmagick, and if they don't, if they'll install it. But, assuming I get some time, I should have something up relatively soon. Once it's up I'll move this blog over there. I just like controlling my own stuff I guess.

I've been trying to get back into EWL programming and to that end have done a couple of little cleanups/fixes in the code. Nothing major, my brain isn't ready to accept working on anything like ewl_tree2 or ewl_paned at the moment. I think it's coming back, just taking a while.

Nathan has some interesting plans in the works to abstract out the EWL graphics a step further. I've currently pulled out the window and canvas code into engines (it was already wrapped in #ifdef's just had to extract it out) but he's thinking of taking it a step further and abstracting out all the evas/edje related calls in the code. This would give us the flexibility of completely changing out backend. So, you could have a gtk/pango backend along side the Evas/Edje backend.

I've actually been spending a bunch of my time lately looking up information on D20 Future. I've owned this for a while and Anderson is currently running a campaign in it for a couple people but I'm toying with the idea of making my own campaign. So, I've been looking up other peoples ideas and other tools that might be useful for this kind of thing. If you've got any suggestions send me an email and let me know. Not sure if it'll pan out or not, I have a tendency to get bogged down in details (and with a whole galaxy to work with, that's a lot of details.

On a final note, the wedding plans seem to be coming together pretty well. We sent out the invitations the other day and they've started to arrive (I still have to get two addresses, I'm a bad man, heh). Other plans seem to be coalescing into something coherent as well. It should all be good. I hope.