Archive for the 'Review' Category
Today as a part of Dragon Magazine issue 364, Wizards released some new illusion based powers for the Wizard. It is nice to see some additional powers with specific flavor for the Wizard who is a bit fragmented in the Player’s Handbook — and since these powers attack an opponent’s Will defense they can be a critical part of a successful party since many tough creatures have deficient Will defenses. Additionally, while these powers don’t deal as much damage as others, they have some very useful additional effects — imposing attack penalties, slowing, knocking prone, immobilizing, and granting combat advantage. Having a party member that can degrade the capabilities of enemies at range thus allowing the melee beaters to do their job more easily will greatly improve your chances of accomplishing multiple milestones per “day”. I’ll probably draw up a wizard that uses some of these powers soon.
Today on my feed of application releases from Freshmeat, was an application that might be of interest to any story writers — StorYBook:
StorYBook is a free, open source story writing software for creative writers, novelists and authors that helps to keep the overview over the strands when writing a book, a novel or a story. StorYBook assists you in structuring your book.
Have all your data in one place. With StorYBook you can manage summaries, characters and locations and assign them to the related chapters.
It seems like it might be very useful organizing a multi-threaded story, but it is disappointing that there isn’t built in capacity to actually write your chapters. I was able to get it running under OS-X even without an installer so I can help any Mac users (Adam) that want to give it a try.
On Friday, Snarkykat and I went to see 21. While the movie is enjoyable at times, the scenes in Vegas are completely unbelievable (very mild spoilage below):
* The team spends way too much time together in Vegas, so it would be simple to identify and flag them as a team. According to Snarkykat, in the book they all travelled to Vegas independently and *NEVER* talked.
* The “hot table” signal is horrible. It generally consists of the spotter obviously making eye contact and then obtrusively crossing her arms behind her. Even the dumbest pit boss would pick up on the signal.
* The “old Vegas” beatdowns are entirely unbelievable — can you say DNA evidence?
* The med school justification for the primary character is (according to Snarkykat) entirely invented in the screenplay and turns the story into a bad sitcom.
Don’t go to the theatre for this one ($14 bucks for two matinee tickets!?!?!), wait to watch it at home if you are really interested.
I’ve watched the first two episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and while I have enjoyed parts of the show I just can’t justify watching it. I have two serious issues with the show:
Warning there are some spoilers for the first two episodes.
Time Travel: while the original “Terminator” started with time travel it was treated as a near unique event (only done twice — the Terminator and Kyle Reece). But in the series, there are six time travel incidents: Good Terminator, Bad Terminator, the scientist, the bank jump, the freedom fighters, and Bad Terminator 2. This strikes me as the worst kind of Rick Berman plot that culminated in the “Temporal Cold War” that was the initial plot of “Star Trek: Enterprise”. This is just a sign of desperate writers that don’t have a good plot and have to rely on attracting a sci-fi audience with gimics.
Inconsistency: The show doesn’t even follow the time travel rules faithfully — even at the same time the rules are quoted. Specifically, nothing artificial can travel through time (unless wrapped in organic mater). At the Bank Jump, just as the protagonists are about to make their time travel, Sarah fires plasma weapon (?) at Bad Terminator destroying its skin and blowing of its head. At first I nodded in approval thinking that this was how SkyNet gets its start — with the technology from this destroyed Bad Terminator — but no. The damaged bad Terminator is transported to the future with the protagonists — when it should have been eliminated just like the plasma weapon and the protagonists clothes.
I cannot forgive these failures because allowing them to continue just drags down the quality of future shows. Instapundit seems to enjoy the show — and I agree about Summer Glau’s acting skill and spookiness, but it isn’t enough for me.
Last week the University Bookstore had an author signing event with Mark Ferrari for The Book of Joby. It isn’t too often that my name is in a book, let alone the title. Latter I found out that the author is a friend of a friend of one of my friends: Jeannie. The author, of course, had no idea about my existence when writing the book, but it is still an interesting coincidence (or perhaps the Force at work…). I didn’t attend the signing event because of our Friday D&D game, but Jeannie did.
Last night when Aly came home from Jeannie’s birthday event, she handed me a gift from Jeannie. She had purchased a copy of The Book of Joby, and the author signed it with:
To Joby…
(Wow! It’s so weird to be writing to you!)
Enjoy!
Mark Ferrari
8/24/2007
Thanks Jeannie, that was very nice. I’ll write a full review when I finish it, but I did enjoy the first chapter (PDF).
I’ve been trying to get a bit more organized and one element of that is an organized calendar so I can track the things I am supposed to be doing, but can never seem to remember. At work we have an implementation of Oracle Calendar (which I’ve never been very impressed with, though it does work) and I don’t want to have to reference two different calendars.
Google Calendar to the rescue. Your calendar is composed of several sub-calendars, each of which represents a different individual context or group. With this framework you can assign different permission sets to each calendar. Additionally you can subscribe to group or general calendars or outside resources. Currently I have 6 calendars:
1) my personal calendar
2) my friend’s birthdays (that I can share with all of them, so we don’t have to maintain separate lists)
3) my family birthdays (again sharable)
4) my work calendar (subscribed via the Oracle Calendar iCAL feed)
5) US Holidays (a public calendar provided by Google — there are holidays for numerous nations)
6) Phases of the Moon (another Google public calendar)
The Google Calendar interface is pretty slick, but you can now use Thunderbird as a rich calendar client by using Lightning. So I decided to give it a try. After upgrading to the current alpha version of Thunderbird (which finally has a visual notification popup for Linux) and installing the necessary extensions, I was able to easily work with my Google Calendar calendars (1-3 above) though some quick tests easily demonstrated that this is still early alpha technology.
When I tried to subscribe to my work calendar, I had significantly less success. First, only meetings that I scheduled would show up — and those are the meetings that I generally don’t need reminders for. Second, having the work calendar active seemed to greatly affect the stability of the application — other calendars would regularly disappear only to reappear by deactivating all the calendars and then reactivating them.
Despite my disappointment with using Thunderbird, I am very impressed with Google Calendar and will continue to expand my use of the application. Thanks, Google!
The GameMastery Critical Hit Deck available from Paizo is pretty slick:
Tired of the same old double damage? Wouldn’t you rather chop your opponent’s head off in one clean swing or put an arrow through his heart? Paizo Publishing presents the GameMastery Critical Hit Deck!
Rolled a critical hit? Draw a card and apply the result! Each of the Critical Hit cards in this 52-card deck has four different results based on weapon type, all of which are compatible with the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game. Chop off a head, slice through a tendon, poke out an eye—crushing your enemy has never been this much fun.
Useable [sic] by experienced GMs and novices alike, this product fits perfectly into any Game Master’s arsenal.
In our last session we used the deck for the first time with good results. It hasn’t made much difference in the combat yet, but it certainly wasn’t a hindrance. The new damage types haven’t come into play because the only combat was pretty short with our opponents obliterated (Laike, a cleric of Aventurnus, brought one opponent to -20 hp or so) or in hiding. But I do like the idea of some more variety in damage dealt — and the additional work is all the DMs!
This week we should be able to give the deck more of a run as we penetrate the Temple of Demogorgon on the Isle of Dread.
Wizard’s has released their Previews for April and Beyond, and there are a few items of note:
1) Expedition to the Demonweb Pits will be released this month. This is a reworking of the classic G123, D123, Q1 series of D&D modules. The excerpts that they have made available (and my prior knowledge of having the original modules) certainly has me interested in doing this adventure. Fortunately, our DM has his copy so maybe after we finish the Savage Tide adventure we’ll get to it. Though we do still have the Ravenloft adventure to try as well…
2) There is more information on May’s release of Drow of the Underdark. The Gloom Strike [Ambush] feat looks pretty cool. The Drow just rock!
3) Not much info (again) on the Complete Champion. I’m hoping for some more optional class features and an expansion of skill tricks (introduced in the Complete Scoundrel)
We’re watching Ultraviolet right now. Oh my God, this is sooooo bad. The plot, the writing, the effects, and the fight scenes — all so completely horrible. The only good thing so far was when Ultraviolet (Milla Jovovich) used some idiot’s dreadlocks to kill him. Don’t see this — Ever: 0 Stars
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Tuesday, we watched The 40 Year Old Virgin staring Steve Carell. It is probably unfortunate that the last movie we watched was Wedding Crashers, because in comparison 40… fell short. Overall I enjoyed the movie and there were some extremely funny bits. The start was quite slow, but once the plot finally got underway — where Carell tries to follow the frequently faulty advise of his coworkers — I could not stop laughing. But all to soon the movie fell into typical romantic comedy cliche, with a saccharine ending. And the musical finale to the tune of Age of Aquarius was horrific.
So to sum up, The 40 Year Old Virgin is funny but has many flaws. Probably worth seeing, but don’t pay much… 3.5 stars.
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