The last few Saturdays, I've been trying out my iPad for our D&D sessions. I've used a variety of technologies over the years: paper, laptops, smart phones, and now tablets. Sometimes it feels like more effort than it's worth, but fundamentally I feel like my nerdy toys should support my nerdy habits, if you know what i mean.

So what's the best use of smart paper (ipad, whatever) with tabletop gaming? Dice, shared boards, and rule checks are obvious but unsatisfying answers. How far do they take us? Better answers seem to revolve around simplifying repetitive tasks, but D&D4 already does a nice job of this with the character builder & the cards it prints out. So where's the sweet spot?

Week One: Spreadsheets

The first week, I focused on making a character sheet, using a spreadsheet. I entered most of the statistics supplied from the standard D&D character sheet, with a thought towards having a convenient reference. On a whim, I also created a sheet to track damage done to monsters, and a simple formula to guess total monster health based on when the monster is bloodied.

What was most interesting to me was it was the last piece that was what I used the most. The recapitulation of stats was fine, but it didn't add much to what I could get from having a physical piece of paper in front of me. Tracking the combat, on the other hand, gave me a fairly visceral way to see what was going on in the fight.

Week Two: Web Apps

Yesterday, I decided to try a different tack. My DM has frequently talked up a web application named "iPlay4e," which takes the ddi files generated from the Character Creator app, and turns it into an interactive, web-based character sheet.

I had tried iPlay4e before, but it hadn't stuck. The iPhone view is pretty nice, but you just can't see enough information. Also, while you can "share" character sheets, only the original owner can use it interactively. By interactively, I mean that they can do things like track health, which abilities have been used, how many action points have been used, etcetera.

I finally uploaded my character sheets to my own account, and tried the interactive features out. I was pretty surprised to find that they were real game changers. There were two important differences between my spreadsheet efforts and iPlay4e. The first was the general level of polish for tracking all of the little details that one has to track in a gameplay session (and support for the normal ways of refreshing those resources, like short and extended rests). The second was a little thing called the D&D Compendium.

The D&D Compendium is a part of a subscription-based service offered by Wizards of the Coast. It contains all of the snippets of rules texts contained in all the 4th Edition D&D books, including errata. It has a searchable and filterable database of rules, items, classes, etc.

I've subscribed to this service for a few months now, but I didn't use the compendium much. It was somewhat awkward to use on a phone's screen, and lugging a laptop back and forth to gaming is not the best solution for me. (More on this topic later.)

Using it with a larger screen was again, a revelation. Suddenly I wasn't dragging four or more books around (I've taken to leaving the books in the car, for convenience). And the best part is, the compendium is integrated with iPlay4e, so suddenly my character sheet is directly indexed into the books.

In short, I loved iPlay4e. I made a donation to the author during the play session, because I thought it was so cool. I wish I'd listened to my DM earlier.

Why the tablet?

So... why don't I just lug a laptop? I have in the past, and have worked up elaborate spreadsheets & dice roller apps (ranging from GUI-based to perl-based). The reasons can be summed up as follows:

• My laptop bag is heavier than carrying my D&D books.
• If I'm using my laptop, I'm secretly browsing the web.

The latter point is the biggest issue: attention span. Having lots of windows means that if the game slows down, you've lost me. And there's a big damn wall in front of my face, so you don't even know if you had my attention in the first place. Laptops suck, because they take you out of the social interaction.

I've been using my phone, since the iPhone and other modern smartphones have finally introduced real web browsers and chat tools to a small form factor. But the tablet is big enough to use data visualization, and small enough to carry around without it being a thing. The battery life on the iPad in specific is also a huge factor -- there's zero chance I'm going to bother carrying around extra crap like a power adapter, because there's zero chance I'm going to run out of juice. From this morning's charge to this evening's writing of this blog post, I still had 30% left after a day's usage.

Also, new nerdy toys are fun. I like to dip my chocolate in my peanut butter.

Why not paper & books?

I will say that I'm resisting the urge to use dice rollers. After using many over the years, I currently feel like if I'm not actively rolling the dice, I'm not playing the game. The D20 is iconic to this game in particular, and I'd like to hear it hit the table.

The WOTC software tools for D&D4e are great, if regrettably not available for the Mac. Being able to print out character powers and items with the roll formulas computed for your character is huge. I honestly didn't feel the need for any kind of software solution for quite a while. That started to change as I hit level 10 and higher though, and the number of cards I was juggling became difficult to manage. If iPlay4e did nothing else, it wins by sorting my power "cards" by what phase they can be used in, and how often they recharge, and then letting me "check them off" as I use them. This does solve a real problem that I was having trying to use the cards, once the number of cards got unwieldy.

The spreadsheet is nice to have, although I freely admit it's mostly me trying to reverse engineer the monster stats based on observable phenomena, since I don't get a running hit point count or monster defenses level. I used to track that on the whiteboard that we game on top of, but as the maps got bigger and the number of cards grew, I lost valuable whiteboard space.

The books have just gotten heavy, now that I own four or more. I'd love to avoid having to carry them all.

So what have I learned so far?

• The web tools for D&D are far better than I realized; if you're using a web-enabled device of any stripe, you should check them out.
• I'm interested in toys & tools that keep me in, not out, of the social aspects of my gaming.
• I'm still a pretty far cry from my initial desire: getting beyond the obvious ways these tools can enhance the experience beyond what pen & paper can do, and into what's novel about something like a tablet. I look forward to finding more answers out, though.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 01:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1997, I took the first trip that I actually tried to document and write about. I was a grad student, and I went to France with the other members of my research team to go to a research conference. I was also a relatively recent owner of a PalmPilot Pro, and so I furiously scribbled out a series of e-mail missives for later sending.

In 2001, I found the analog photos that I took of the trip, and finally put the e-mails & scanned images together into a Paris 1997 travelogue.

(The next big trip like this was Paris in 2005 with Carrie, but I phoned that one in a lot more, with just a few shots posted to my blog, apparently.)

The next whack I took at this was the Christmas 2008 trip to England. My approach this time was to take a large number of photos during the day, then upload & edit them that night, and make a coherent blog post for the day with -- usually -- no more than three photos as highlights. This shows up on the December 2008 and January 2009 archive pages of my blog, although, regrettably, the reverse chronological order suffers for later reading.

The trip to Hawaii we just returned from, on the other hand, has no tangible record, because I posted it mostly to Facebook, which is generally walled off. You can piece it together from my Facebook wall, since I generally don't use the privacy settings, but it's still not put together in any kind of coherent form.

Granularity and Community

Of the three, I think the first one stands up best as a piece of writing. Yes, I have ten years more experience under my belt now, but it was actually written to be read later. It probably tells the best story for someone who's interested in the trip after the fact.

On the other hand, the Facebook entries were the most satisfying for me. Since I was working from a facebook-enabled cameraphone, I felt like I could show interesting things as I encountered them, and getting comments as we explored gave me a real sense of remaining connected to community. I recognized that I was probably splatting out about twice as much information as people really cared about, but we were having fun and seeing interesting things, and I wanted to share that enthusiasm. In a very nerdy way, it was sort of like the kind of community I get from being in an MMO -- I can engage in my own activities, but I can share those activities and use it as a springboard for conversations.

By contrast, the blog entries generated almost no commentary, making them feel much more sterile to me. I got a sense of craftsman's pleasure from making them, but once they were out there, they already felt somewhat adrift and context-free.

Technology Evolution

Obviously, a number of these technologies have shifted on the spectrum: digital cameras have become portable and have great quality now. The very idea of being constantly connected to the network is plausible in a way it wasn't even a few years ago. And being able to take a picture and post it to Facebook from the open seas encourages both a spontaneity and a logorrhea that still demand a new kind of a writing style to be worked out. As I write this, I realize that I'd really love to have a good way to take snippets of writing that I'm -- for lack of a better word -- beta-ing on Facebook, and pull them back together into a narrative that stands alone.

The GPS angle is also somewhat interesting, although I rarely used Twitter to tell any of the most recent narrative, and Twitter has the most robust geolocation. I used Gowalla to some extent, but I have the suspicion that people either find geo-social-blah-blah either fascinating or incredibly boring, and there's almost no in-between. I also messed around with an app called "Trip Journal," which tries to produce a map of your journey along with associated pictures. It's reasonably well done, but in the end it was too much of a hassle (and too much of a battery drain), and the options for getting the story out of the app didn't really fit my needs.

I'm curious to hear others' reactions to these different forms of storytelling. Is it interesting? At what point does it become too much? What ways do you document & retell your stories and adventures as or after they happen?

In Conclusion...

...here are some badass pictures of humpback whales that I took:

Posted by Eric Tilton at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New character posing/3D model viewing tool from inside the Warcraft armory came out tonight. Wowhead has had something like this, but this one finally lets you scan through the animation loops, and has pretty high quality visuals to boot. I'm kind of surprised they didn't add Twitter & Facebook links though -- that seems de rigeur these days :)

My main:

My eeeeevil alt:

...and the somewhat camera-shy in-game standin for me:

Posted by Eric Tilton at 02:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the enduring fixtures of my time in Austin has been Saturday gaming. We've gone through a variety of systems in our time, including GURPS, a couple variations of D&D, and some pretty interesting indy systems (and some Mary Sue-tastic stretches of freestyle storytelling). Of late, we've been playing Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, and having a blast doing it.

D&D4e has streamlined a lot of the combat from previous incarnations, and, dare I say it, made it actually fun. In earlier incarnations, I had special abilities, but I never particularly felt encouraged to use them. In 3rd Edition especially, I felt I spent most of my time doing auto-attacks. 4th edition almost falls over itself to throw a variety of powers at you, though, and most of them are one-time-use, so you're actually encouraged to mix up what you're doing. Because the combat is more fun (and also because good GM software tools are provided to ease the creation of encounters), we find we pull out the grid map way more often then we ever did before.

At some point when we were doing this, Kevin -- our GM -- started trying to take pictures of the board as we were going. He'd been inspired by the Penny Arcade d&d session twitters. I found this to also be pretty interesting, especially with the following combo platter of geek tools:

• camera on iPhone
• twitter & facebook apps on iPhone
• decent photo editing tools on the iPhone (like my current favorite to abuse, TiltShiftGen)

I do have a blogging app on the iPhone, but it's way more annoying to use. So I thought I'd take the time and put together a longer entry on the phenomenon and output of this.

Beginnings

I started using the camera just to document stuff that I'd put on the tabletop whiteboard, in case it got erased before the next week. For example, here was an experimental system we used to track a particularly amoral character's swings to and from the dark side:

I took the shot as a quick and dirty way to make sure I knew how the points were laid out between sessions. This actually predates GM Kevin's interest in the PA twitter feeds.

Here's another example, where I was tracking gold & XP for my character on the whiteboard (our GM has moved to tracking this stuff via a D&D oriented wiki space):

The dapper gent with the multiple legs and the top hat is the famed "pattern spider," who likes from time to time to jump into our games and dump lots of exposition on us. (As I recall, the in-joke here is mostly making fun of me, for badgering Kevin in an early game to explain the whole mystery through this one NPC that had the grievous loophole of having an omniscient viewpoint. For some reason, the spider had a fancy hat and a cigar and a Brooklyn accent.)

Action shots

Here we see my first effort. Note how masterfully I tank the dragon away from the group, putting all of my hard-won World of Warcraft experience to bear. (A few turns earlier I'd let the dragon turn and toast everyone >_< )

Later on, I picked up Camera Bag, which had handy pre-canned photo effects. I became a quick fan of the vignetting here:

At the end of the day, the iPhone camera is fine, but it's not going to shine in a room that's only lit by some normal light bulbs. So I'm kind of trying to embrace the grainy, cruddy nature of the cameraphone with this. Also, it's in Fantasy Past Time, and thus should be colored in the style of a Wild West Poster, which was pretty much the same timeframe.

Later on, GM Kevin picked up the aforementioned TiltShiftGen, and started FBing pictures that were clearly manipulated with it. A tilt shift lens (or software program used to fake the effect) provides a very distinctive dollhouse style, as you can see at the linked website.

I've only used it a bit, and I will freely confess that I actually am using it even more for the color sliders. But being able to fake a depth of field effect is pretty nice. The main problem I have with it is that it degrades pretty quickly at the cruddy resolutions & qualities that I'm capturing in this environment. But still, I was pretty happy with the ominous result obtained here:

Posted by Eric Tilton at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I told myself I wasn't going to be one of "those" Prius drivers. "I'm getting this car," I told myself, "because this is a nerd toy. A geek luxury device. Because, in short, it is from the future." I wasn't getting the car so I could become obsessed with gas mileage, and correct drivingthink, and so that I could enjoy the curiosity and adulation of fellow drivers.

And I wasn't. But they put a videogame inside my car, and it's not my fault.

I've had Saturns since I've had cars. This is my third car, and the first two were both variations on the Saturn sedan of the time. At first, I really liked the philosophy of Saturn, but over the past several years Carrie & I have both become fairly disillusioned with the increasingly poor customer service. After spending several hundred dollars to get an issue fixed with my Ion that ended up not being fixed anyway, requiring further repairs, I pretty much gave up. The Ion had been a Fine Vehicle, but I was ready for something... sexier. Cooler. Dare I say... Nerdier.

When I went shopping for the Ion in the early part of the century, we test drove the first version of the Prius. Regrettably, it kind of sucked for such tall and leggy people as ourselves. That, plus the incredible waiting lists for hybrids at the time, caused me to put the idea on the shelf of wistfulness. But now that a car replacement was on the table, Carrie's research found that the current cars had been substantially re-worked inside. We went to go test-drive a second generation Prius, and were pleasantly surprised. It felt roomy and awesome, handled well, and it was full of status displays and readouts.

Far forward to a month or two later. Research had been done. Pondering had been pondered. Hate for current car had escalated. Remaining administrative details necessary in order to unload old car had been dealt with. My car title was in hand, Apple stock was reasonably up, and I was ready to enter the future.

Technological Terror

Those who know me will be unsurprised to know that I'm a fairly pragmatic liberal. My general rule of thumb is "try not to suck." I'm also probably the very definition of technocrat. So ever since I first heard about hybrid cars, my first thought was, "well, duh, that seems obvious -- why doesn't every car do that?" I mean, when I was 12 and didn't understand about things like entropy, I didn't understand why a car couldn't just run off the friction from spinning the wheels.

Well. Happy day.

It's important to note that the futurecar is not a magic bullet. Despite being rated at something like 50mpg, it'll still perform in fine mediocre fashion if you're spending lots of time between stoplights, accelerating a lot. (Where "mediocre" here is defined as "still better than my Ion" -- but more like 30mpg than the advertised 50mpg.) It'll also be totally happy to perform like a dancing pig if you drive it like one.

But they put this videogame inside my car, see.

It's a little bar. And when I accelerate, the little bar fills up. And if I can keep that little bar in the lines then I get more experience points! Or something like that. Maybe my combos fill up faster. All I know is that suddenly my car has a competitive angle.

I can also flip to this other display where I can find out how fast my XP is piling up:

Yeah -- a bar graph that breaks down my XP gains over the five minutes, or even by every minute. Honestly, I don't know why they didn't make the graph continuous like a CPU meter. Oh right -- it's because I'd never watch the road, and crash into a bus full of school-children who were on a science field trip. Because irony works like that.

So like I said. It's not my fault. They put a video game in my car. And now I'm determined to do better than that lame-ass 30mpg showing I have from the first 200 miles. Seriously -- what a noob.

Geek Luxury

But like I said, that's not actually why I bought the car. Remember that picture from the top of the entry? I bought the car because it looks like a goddamned spaceship. I seriously feel like I should be able to dock with a Federation starship in this thing. I'm continually searching for the laser beams.

My favorite feature -- especially in light of a problem I had with the Ion involving keys -- is that this thing is essentially keyless. I have the little keyfob, but in day-to-day operation it never comes out of my pocket. Here's how you unlock the car, assuming the keyfob is near the car:

Yeah. You pretty much just put your hand on the handle and pull. Here, then, is how you lock the car:

Words cannot describe how giddy this makes me.

Inside, the car looks like a spaceship as well:

You can't really see it in the picture, but there's actually a fair degree of three-dimensionality to the console display. Including, if you hold down buttons on the steering wheel, you get a little heads up display around the MPH readout:

Generally, the car just feels comfortable to ride in. It feels spacious on the inside without feeling like an SUV or a truck. The driver & passenger seats feel like little spacepods... but in a cool, comforting way. The built-in bluetooth smoothly picked up my phone when I sat in the car, and flipped it over into the car's speakerphone. The car starts by depressing a big power button, instead of making me mess around with juggling keys in addition to whatever else I'm carrying.

Seriously, it feels like I bought a laptop I can drive. I keep wanting to find some website where I can download new software for it.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Jan 1st:

The fireworks over the castle were incredible:

Followed soon after by a light show:

The next day, we took the train back home. On our way back through King's Cross station, we saw Platform 9 3/4, of Harry Potter fame:

Jan 2nd:

Attempted to return home -- faulty plane and many annoying travails caused the 2nd to slip into...

Jan 3rd:

...in which we got up at 3:30am to catch a 7am flight, and finally got home. Hooray!

Except for the travel bees at the end, it was an awesome trip. I'm very glad to be home though, now :).

Posted by Eric Tilton at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dec 31st:

Tonight is Hogmanay -- and we're in Edinburgh for it. And it's frickin' cold.

We wandered around today. Edinburgh is an amazing city. The combination of centuries-old architecture and a vibrant city core is enthralling to me in a way that London and Paris haven't been.

I don't have a lot of text for this entry; just three pictures I took today.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I usually try to hold myself to three to five images a post, but I'm indulging myself for the sake of narrative.

Dec 28th:

Our afternoon was mostly taken up in the the British Library.

I would have loved to have shown you pictures of the "National Treasures" exhibit, which included jotted down Beatles lyrics, a Gutenberg Bible, the Magna Carta, and Jane Austen's writing desk; or the provocative "Taking Liberties" exhibit, which showed interesting British historical documents and the context in which they led to modern civil rights, but the British Library didn't allow the taking of photographs :(. Suffice it to say that it was all pretty amazing.

I did snap this shot of The King's Library, which formed the original core of the British Library, and is still apparently expected to be held separate under the terms of the original donation. I wish I'd had a fish-eye lens, because it's much much bigger than this.

This is an iconic sight in the London Underground -- mind the gap!

We went to see a burlesque Sunday night -- La Clique. It was very, very gay. A good time was had by all.

Dec 29th:

Our last full day in London. I had trouble sleeping, but we hit the ground running and spent the day seeing the sights. This was really the first non-holiday weekday of our trip, so we got to see the city in more of its natural state.

First off: Trafalgar Square. I will spare you most of my pictures of statues and fountains.

Next up: we took a "Duck Tour." World War II amphibious landing craft/troop carriers have been repurposed into tour vehicles. Half of the tour was on the streets of London, and the other half was on the River Thames. Our tour guide was replete with bad jokes, and it was a cheesily awesome good time.

Passing another "Duck" on the river:

House of Parliament and Big Ben:

After lunch, we headed over to the Tower of London. On our way, we passed this odd church archway on Seething Lane:

This is the entryway to the Tower. While it's not in this picture, I found it interesting that the gatehouse to the tower was where the security folks were doing bag checks and checking tickets.

The actual Tower was somewhat disappointing, because it was jammed full of people, and the exhibits were somewhat lackluster in providing information and context. Still, the architecture was fascinating, at least partially because it covered so many different eras within a very small amount of acreage.

I found "The Line of Kings" to be impressive:

And this elaborate arrangement of guns in the royal armoury:

We passed on waiting in line to see the Crown Jewels, though. This picture shows part of the incredibly long line, and also some of the architectural whiplash:

This picture has three interesting things in it. First, a tower raven (in the left). Second, a really old-ass wall. Third, a representative queue of people waiting to get into one of the many tiny tower exhibits.

Here's a close-up of that same raven from the last picture:

Some more architectural whiplash -- it's the London Gherkin in the background!

And here's Tower Bridge and the oddly shaped London City Hall in one shot:

Finally, Tower Bridge at night:

From the Tower of London, we headed to Newham to catch a panto. However, the guide we used steered us wrong, and this one completely failed to have any of the sly subversive humor we were promised. Instead, it was a pretty straight up kid's show. We left after the intermission and spent a quiet evening in the hotel room.

And this morning we're on a train to Edinburgh! More on that in the next post.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 07:14 AM | Permalink

Dec 27th: The British Museum.

Our hotel is just around the corner from the British Museum, which is quite an impressive edifice. The interior courtyard gave me a uniquely 21st century bit of deja vu, because I'd seen it before -- in Hellgate: London (note: this is the only part of London I've actually placed from this game). I remember quite distinctly battling some evil yet nondescript creature up and down the stairs that encircle the reading room in the center of the courtyard.

Our first stop was the Egyptian exhibit. As we wandered around, we overheard a gentleman translating the hieroglyphs to his companion. He noticed our interest, and began walking us through some of the basic details of the offering formula featured on the piece we were observing:

We also particularly enjoyed this statue of Ishtar as war goddess:

The drinking horns, and the room of Viking stuff they were contained in, got The Immigrant Song irrevocably stuck in our head:

Possibly the most depressing aspect of the museum was the exhibit of Parthenon statues:

The tone was oddly defensive -- "hey, if we hadn't bought these statues off of a dissolute English lord who picked up their pieces out of the rubble of wars and explosions, I mean, heck, they'd be destroyed by now!" Which, while probably true, didn't make it feel any less like we were viewing the corpse of the Parthenon, laid out on the operating table for us to view.

I'm not entirely sure why this exhibit in particular felt worse than the others in this regard. I think it might have been the sad history of the Parthenon -- it was used as an ammo dump in a 17th century war, and a shell lit off the gunpowder stored inside, which did much of the damage to the structure. It might have been the horrible shape most of the statuary was in, compared to the other pieces on display.

For me, though, it was seeing these statues that are meant to loom over us, sitting stacked one next to the other at eye level, battered and beaten. It's not how I pictured the place. In a way, the Carnegie's display of plasters of these ancient statues had more of a sense of the grand scope I expected.

Still, that hall aside, we found the British Museum overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Our feet hurt, but our heads are full. Also, we took high tea in the museum's cafe, and that was both tasty and delicious.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dec 24th: We arrived, got settled in. Walked around the neighborhood a bit. Took a lot of jet-lag naps.

Dec 25th: Almost adjusted to new time zone. Had a delicious Turkey dinner at a local restaurant, which was totally ruined by incredibly rude waitstaff. I did not get my Christmas Pudding :(.

Settled in for evening of BBC, including Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf & Death (new!!!), and an amusing Black Adder documentary. Missed the new Doctor Who Christmas special due to a tragic misreading of the BBC website, so have been watching it fits & starts on the awful BBC iPlayer service, which goes to great lengths to be hostile to my efforts to let the damn thing queue up over my slow Internet connection.

Overall, a very nice, relaxed Christmas, despite minor annoyances.

Dec 26th: We set out!

First we went to the London Eye, which is a bizarrely large millennial ferris wheel situated in downtown London:

We obtained tickets, and saw London from a bird's eye view as part of a 30 minute single rotation around the wheel. Between the lateness of the year and the northernness of London, the light was already fading, but I got some bizarrely Blade Runner-esque vistas:

Next, we took a cab over to the rebuild Globe Theatre, which is pretty freaking awesome:

The original Globe burnt down, so this one was rebuilt in the late 20th century to be as close to the original conditions as possible. We took the tour, which was awesome. Our crusty, feisty guide had all kinds of awesome stories about the place:

We now totally want to come back in the summer when they're actually doing a play.

Finally, we booked it over to the West End, where we had tickets for Avenue Q tonight. Sadly, the Noel Coward Theatre is designed for very small people with very short legs, but we still had a blast actually finally seeing the musical, as opposed to just hearing the soundtrack as much as we can stand.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Somehow, in my characters' elaborate backstories, they all end up to be family members. Here, we see Cynnosure, holy warrior, posing with her younger sister Checkers, who has recently embraced the light. These two holy warriors are nothing if not pragmatic -- Cynnosure saw Checkers' time spent studying the shadow as only sensible.

Cynnthia & Felicia have a somewhat more complicated relationship, as they had very different reactions to the death of their parents to the Scourge. Cynnthia chose to confront her anger head on, with a sword. Felicia has adopted the dark magics that brought the undead into existence -- she says, to better combat them. Neither really understands or respects the other's decision, but they still try to make it work.

Cynndethiel Stormwalker had a sister, once. Dechesel was lost in the fighting when the Burning Legion invaded Ashenvale, and was presumed dead.

Imagine, then, Cynne's surprise when the Knights of the Ebon Hold renounced the Scourge - and Dechs was among the undead Death Knights now returning to the Alliance, and renewing old ties.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cynne Stormwalker, originally uploaded by tiltology.

I'm aware that my occasional hobby of making MMO character portraits is just one of the many ways in which I am a huge dork. This, however, is extra dorky because it's formatted for use as my iPhone background. OH THE BURNING.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not sure what compels me make these postcards from an apocalyptic alternate land of struggle and magic, but make them I must. All for you, the home viewer. I imagine Cynne traveling on her many journeys, and thinking -- say, I bet the folks would really enjoy the scenery that underscores our impending struggle between good and evil.

She's more considerate than I am, in many ways. Odd and crazy... but true.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 01:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Warrior of the Light, originally uploaded by tiltology.

Like Gandalf, my Paladin is an angel.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here, by the way, is what I needed a working copy of Photoshop for:

My various alts don't really have a chance to hang out together much, you see.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We had some time on Monday before our flight out of the Twin Cities, so we went to an ur-greasy spoon that runs out of an old railroad car: Mickey's Diner. I didn't quite grasp that if you wanted veggies on your burger, you had to order it wussy "California Style," but it was still quite delicious.

Then we attempted to go the Minnehaha Falls, but they turn out to be a popular destination on Labor Day, and there was no parking to be found. So, with terror held in our hearts, we approached something that was -- in fact -- no moon, but rather the Mall (all-all-all) of America (erica-erica-erica).

Fun fact: From the outside it doesn't look so big. What makes it terrifying is the density inside -- four levels and lots of replication. The core is taken up with, no joke, an amusement park:

...but we didn't come for that. We came for the Lego Store, which is both a hoot AND a holler, which I'm sure you'll all be delighted to learn.

I've got the rest of the pictures up on Flickr in a set for your enjoyment, as well.

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Carrie and I spent the Labor Day weekend up in the Minneapolis/St Paul area, to attend the wedding of Florence and Marty. Florence is an old friend of ours from our Carnegie Mellon days (are we old enough to have old friends? The answer, apparently, is yes). We met Marty for the first time this weekend, and it was wonderful to see how how well they were matched for each other.

I was incredibly charmed by the children attending, especially this young stinker:

Carrie generally ran around being awesome and making things go, but she also engaged in some craftiness, making the table runner for the head table:

Some detail:

One small bit of trivia: the bride & groom met playing boardgames, and the groom is a big boardgame geek. So he designed a game as part of the party favors for the guests to take home:

Posted by Eric Tilton at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Carrie & I drove up to Multnomah Falls today with my mom. It was very cold out, but also very pretty.

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Update: the ivoted tag.

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Posted by Eric Tilton at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brother Chris and I went down to the Congress Avenue Bridge to see the bats.

After that, we took some arty shots of downtown lights on long exposures.

We concluded by rocking, and not bothering knocking.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PhotographyBLOG has an interesting post on a technology demo from Microsoft called Photosynth, which stitches together photos into a 3D panorama that you can navigate in. There's some cool -- but still pie in the sky -- thoughts about the massive indexing you might do to navigate the entire world of photos in this way, using your own snapshots as entry points into exploration. The promotional video is at least 50% fluff (you can skip most of the first half), but has some interesting nuggets.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We just got back from an overlapping work trip -- Carrie was in San Jose for BlogHer (as was Skye), and I was in Cupertino catching up on some long overdue meetings. Then we both kicked around for the weekend in sunny CA and met up with folks, including Nigel (who was also in town on work!) and large chunks of my family who drove down from Sacramento and met us in Oakland.

Before finally heading for the airport, we did sneak off to see the ocean, at bee-yoo-tiful Half Moon Bay. I finally indulged myself and picked up a Canon SD700 IS ELPH for the occasion; I love my SLR, but it's bulky enough that I don't want to take it for casual photography. So, after two years of pining, we decided it counted as a birthday present :). It's ideal for casual photography -- I couldn't be happier.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another entry in the "character poster" series.

For some reason, ever since Daggerfall, I've always had a character named Felicia. In WoW, this turned out to be especially apropo, since the word "fel" refers to warlock-y things in the Warcraft mythos. Not that I realized this until a year later, of course. Sharp as a tack!

Posted by Eric Tilton at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Death Star Pez Dispenser

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Some boxes of type seen in an antique shop:

OK, Flickr might do as a photo sharing platform.

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Posted by Eric Tilton at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I finally got Photon to correctly upload my pictures, only to discover that

(a) it wants to do a separate post per picture, and
(b) the default MT stylesheet wants to clip my pictures horizontally, and I'm too stupid about stylesheets to get it to work right at the moment.

So pictures may return later when I feel like fighting with MT some more. So this is the one thing Radio does better out of the box so far. Wheee.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)