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Author: Bryant

Gaming Borders

I don’t post every new Fiasco playset that pops up, cause I maintain that list over on Claw/Claw/Peck, but Liquidation is too good to miss. Particularly since I was talking about how Borders was close to going under the other week.

Crossings is one of the biggest bookstore chains in the country. Due to a changing market and (according to some) mismanagement, the company has been in pretty bad shape for a while. Now the other shoe has finally dropped, and Crossings has declared bankruptcy. All of the stores are closing, just as soon as they can liquidate enough of their merchandise. In the midst of it all, you’re going to become some of the employees and regulars, out to get the best deals (or steals), settled grudges, or maybe just get your life in order before the inevitable end.

Grim humor, my favorite!

Google and Video

Google hates H.264! H.264 is used almost everywhere, not just for Web video; it’s also the Blu-Ray encoding standard. So this is very exciting.

Despite my knee-jerk pro-Apple response, I believe that Google is correct in stating that WebM is the better political choice for Web standards. It is open in the sense that there’s no licensing fee and Google has no ability to institute one. It is not an open standard insofar as the standard does not belong to an impartial standards body, which is slightly problematic, but practically speaking it’s not a huge deal. H.264 does, FWIW, belong to such a body. But it’s not free to license, and that is again the more important issue.

WebM may not be the better choice from a legal point of view, in that we don’t know if it’s encumbered by patents. It would be nice if Google would indemnify people using WebM from patent lawsuits, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to require them to do so. Google doesn’t have to do your legal work for you, even if it would be nice if they did. Anyhow, I am not competent to have an opinion on the legal issues, so “we don’t know.” If I needed to make a corporate decision about this I’d pay for a lawyer to tell me things.

Technically speaking I don’t care. Web video is not the place where I demand top-notch video quality. H.264 might be better; even if it is, it’s not going to matter 99% of the time.

Now the fun part. Google’s stance, while correct, is in direct conflict with their Flash support. Google’s statement: “Adobe Flash Player is the most widely used web browser plug-in. It enables a wide range of applications and content on the Internet, from games, to video, to enterprise apps.” So, yes, this is true. Likewise, H.264 is the most widely used Web video format, which enables a wide range of video on the Internet. You’re either making decisions based on usage or not.

Which makes me suspect that Google is, with WebM, making the right decision for the wrong reasons. This only makes me about 50% happy.

Edit: this post makes the excellent point that Flash does share one key characteristic with WebM: namely, it’s free to distribute. However, Adobe has not to my knowledge guaranteed this in perpetuity.

Space Marines

Short shameful confession: I’m kind of enjoying the hell out of the Horus Heresy books. Of course this is only because Dan Abnett is quite a competent writer and so on, but excuses aside, big serious people in powered armor are marching across the galaxy and falling to corruption one by one! I have never taken pleasure out of a Warhammer 40K Space Marine book before. Nom nom nom.

About 2010

So there you go. 120 games in 365 days, which maths out to a game every three and a half days. That seems about right. Something like 28 of them were at cons, not counting the game days we ran at our place, which still leaves me at a pace of one game every four days. This may not have been entirely wise, since I’m a bit burned out, but it was fun. I regret very few of those sessions.

I’m not industrious enough to figure out the online vs. face to face count or anything. Half and half, probably. I never really warmed to online play as a main venue for me; more often it was an easy way to get a character into a new band. I liked the people but I didn’t like the medium most of the time.

Susan and I went to DDXP, RegulatorCon, Dexcon, Gencon, and GASPCon. I also went to a local one-day minicon at Games & Stuff. In January, I’d already moved my store game day to Legends; in the summer I gave up on Legends out of frustration with communication problems and (to be honest) a lack of desire on my part to take responsibility for difficult players. I can be tolerant, but I don’t necessarily want to have to be tolerant.

We played at Games & Stuff fairly often. I never got down to the Columbia game day, which is a shame.

The best thing about LFR in 2010 for me was gaming a lot with Susan. Other best things, in order: the Embers of Dawn mini-campaign, the Elturgard Battle Interactive and resulting plot lines, the White Petal Demise major quest,  experiencing paragon play. And of course the people involved in all of these.

120. Ripples in the Stream of Souls (CORE 2-6)

Susan and I went down to Games & Stuff the day after Christmas to play Ripples in the Stream of Souls with Faral and Reed. Jimmy ran; Mark B., Jason B., Amanda, and Terrence were our fellow players.

I liked the moral choices in this module a lot. There was a lot to mull over, there was stuff to investigate without the risk of getting stuck without enough clues, and so on. For the last adventure of the year, I’d say this was pretty good. It was also pleasantly apt that we’d meet a fun new local player in the last game of the year, since that’s always been a big part of the LFR experience for me.

119. Set Adrift (AKAN 2-1)

I ran this down at Games & Stuff for Alan, Hudson, Mark B., Jason B., and Evil Tony. Like most Akanul region mods, it’s a straightforward linear mission. The story is a bit weak for paragon tier PCs, but the opposition is fun and it’s a very tunable module. You can make it deadly dangerous or you can dial down the difficulty as appropriate. It’s also got some interesting monsters.

The entire module takes place on a single map, which happens to be the WotC DM Reward ship tiles. The Fat Dragon Medieval Cog model is just about the same size as that map, so I built the ship, which I am very pleased with. The players liked it too.

Also fun: I came within inches of forcing Alan’s pacifist cleric to give up his peaceful ways. He has this personal vow; if he ever does damage to any creature at all, he’ll give up the pacifist path. This is obviously much more restrictive than the feat requires, but that’s cool. I didn’t know any of this, but I sort of dominated him and forced him to make a charge attack against one of his allies. Barely any chance he’d hit… but he rolled a 20.

Fortunately his 4 points of damage weren’t enough to get through the ally’s damage resistance. But it was close. Neat stuff.

118. A Stab in the Dark (DRAG 1-3)

The second game we played on 12/18 was A Stab in the Dark, which was one of the few H3 modules nobody had ever played. I dragged Alesk out of the folder, since Amanda was GMing and Susan didn’t want to play two games. Jimmy and the Bradleys were the other three players, of course.

This is pretty much your usual Dragon Coast Westgate module. (Previous versions of this post may have been confused, ahem.) I liked the terrain even though it was not at all rewarding to melee – but playing Alesk as a polearm battle cleric was tons of fun anyhow. Plus I’m a sucker for Westgate.

117. Tyranny’s Bitter Frost (SPEC 2-2 P2)

We played a couple of games at the house on 12/18. The first one, which Susan ran, was Tyranny’s Bitter Frost: a bunch of the local peeps who’d played Tyranny’s Bleak Depth’s at Gencon wanted to play the sequel. I happened to have Collin sitting comfortably at the beginning of P2, so that worked out well. (This made his fourth SPEC module in a row, and he’ll be playing the BI later in January. No mundane mods for him.)

The other players were Amanda, Jimmy, Mark B., and Jason B. The usual suspects. It was a super-balanced party and the module went very smoothly despite a couple of nervewracking points. I never enjoy repeats quite as much, but it was fun seeing if Collin could stand up to the task. He could.

Mac App Store

I tried it out; it does what you’d expect. But here’s the ridiculous news, which is best summarized by the following graph. Since the Mac App Store launch, more than half of Evernote’s new users have come from the Mac, compared to a minuscule percentage before the launch.

Evernote new user graph

I mean, it’s the first weekend, and I’m sure it’ll level out. But man.