Sean's Blog

A number of sites online have done tributes to Gygax, and here’s a couple of them. Also, due to size limitations, just click on the image to see the full size image.

Order of the Stick is a webcomic about a adventuring group of, well, stick figures, and is based heavily on D&D. Comic #536 was a tribute to Gygax, and it’s ironic that the main hero of the story is in the afterlife at this point.

Penny Arcade of course is mainly about video games, but they do reference table-top gaming quite frequently. Their tribute was a very simple piece.

Full Frontal Nerdity is practically all about table-top gaming. The FFN tribute was a bit more humorous, but was still tasteful.

Then there’s the comic that is full of dark humor, Something Positive. A handful of the characters have gaming as a part of their background. I’m sure that the character’s (Mike) reaction shown here is similar to many a fanboy after hearing the news.

So that’s all for now. A couple of other comics I read just haven’t put up anything yet, but I expect they will, as they are also influenced but Gygax’s work.

Since my brother mentioned it on my Facebook, here’s a picture of Al Gore and his Time Rangers, which Gygax was a part of.

I’m glad that in 2007 the internet finally almost works like it’s supposed to. You can actually do useful things on it. I think it’s hilarious that it took nerds 38 years to get it working. The first 37 years were spent figuring out how to play D&D using computers, and the last year was their “catch-up” year.

This tale is courtesy of Drew, the artist of toothpaste for dinner, and is from this entry in his blog.

There are things I’ve been meaning to place up here, but never got around to. These items are as follow…

• Religion of Comic Book Characters – Not sure why/how this was made, but random link clicking does provide support to the different religious associations that were made. Much like reading random articles found on Wikipedia about comics, such as House of M and Earth 616, this page will not only prove to be a good use of personal time (if you like comics) for myself, but also for Ryan, once I point him to it.
• A kid got stuck in a claw machine – I think my only comment on that would be “Worst. Prize. Ever.”
• Little. Yellow. Different. – If… no, when… I finally decide to have server (or server-like) piece of hardware in my house, I will probably look for something like the Yellow Machine. It might not be that brand per se, but something like it to be sure. Right now, it’s just under $1000 for 1TB (terabyte) of storage, which is 4 times the size of my current computer HD. That makes my 80GB external HD seem worthless. But, as the the Yellow Machine has RAID, that’ll make the storage of information more reliable. I figure that something like that would also be good depending on what type of work Meghan or I end up doing. Right now, she has tons of CDs of data… being able to place those on a RAID-ed system would be nice.
• The LEGO Dragons – I did a quick search the other day about LEGO dragons and found that page. I particularly liked Tel’Karak Zrahl. I suddenly wished, when I saw that, that I had brought my LEGOs back from my parent’s house since I was there over the weekend.
• Replace your computer fans with cooking oil – Ryan sent this to me a couple weeks ago, but I never quite got around to commenting on it. As the case was, this was something done at the beginning of the year, so you may have heard of it already (I say that as if I have an audience or something). I’m surprised that our current computing technology can actually be place in oil and not suffer adverse effects. Hell, I’m even more surprised that placing the components in distilled (de-ionized) water caused the equipment to stop working, but not suffer any other damage.
• eFlick service – Andy, a friend of mine from back home, sent me a link to a story about the Denver Public Library’s new online movie lease program. At his current job, he’s been (somehow) involved with this project, I think from the tech support end. Good for him.
• While I’m talking about friends, I was home this back weekend for a fund raising dinner for Keith, older brother of my friend Kevin. I’ve known Kevin since first grade, and Keith just about as long. The dinner was to raise money to help pay for Keith’s medical expenses as he is currently fighting cancer. I can’t quite remember what type of cancer, but I hope he and his family make it through everything OK.
• Another friend, Chris, got a job at Microsoft doing some sort of UI development or something. I have no idea, as he has apparently been sucked into a location where he can’t respond to e-mails or login to chat. He can, apparently, still take his turns in Advance Wars By Web.
• How to destroy the Earth – A nice, long page listing various ways you could destroy the Earth. The best part is that thought was actually applied to these options, and rankings given to them based upon feasibility/likeliness. I enjoyed this site quite a bit, and haven’t quite had a chance to explore it fully.
• The Last Question – This is an online version of a story by Issac Asimov. I doubt that it should be on the Internet, but it is definitely worth reading if you have the time; it’s a good story.
• Windows is so slow, but why? – This two page article is from the New York Times, and I found it to be worth reading. It talks about why the Windows code base is so big (backwards compatibility for starters, which Apple doesn’t easily have), and why Windows Vista has been delayed more.

I think that’s it for my list. I’ve been spending some of my free time (probably far too much) playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. I’ve been running with a group called “Damn Koblods” (intentional misspelling) which references the quest “Kobold Assault”. Anyone can tell you that it is one of the first continuous group quests that you don’t get a reprieve from. We all started some new characters last night, and switched who does what. Oddly enough, not only am I a cleric, I’m playing a human, which is odd, considering that my other 3 characters (even though I haven’t really played two of them that much) are warforged. My main character, Matthew Freeforged, has been withing 6000 XP of 6th level for the last 4 or 5 nights. I’ll get there one of these days. (If you have not played DDO but have played regular 3rd Edition D&D, I would be short by 600 instead.)

On a related note, Becky may be starting a D&D game on April 8th. Woot. I realized that my character for this game might have some qualities of my previous character, Fannon, but I think that is because of a couple things:

1. That’s just the type of person I am, and the qualities are in all my characters.
2. I didn’t get to finish the character concept of Fannon, so I still have the desire to play a similar character.

I think that’s it for now. Have a good one.