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Religulous

I’ll see it, for obvious reasons.*

*Like most people I enjoy hearing my personal beliefs touted/endorsed/validated by others.

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Foodio (Food Near My Studio)

Budgies Burritos, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a place directly below my studio space where one can get huge, delicious, sloppy, cheap, vegetarian, hipster-made burritos. They also have nachos but when I order them I have to tell them this menacing laundry list of modifications:

-no jalapenos
-no sour cream
-yes cheese is fine
-add quacamole
-add black beans
-fresh salsa, not hot or green
-nothing on the side, everything on top (reduces plastic use)
-no lid

Maybe I should print that out and they can pin it to the wall as the Toren Special. Last night when I went to my studio Budgie’s was closed, so I puttered around the neighborhood looking for dinner. No Chinese Bakery egg tarts at 9:30pm. Our Town Cafe always has paninis but I’m bored of them and I am not thrilled with the service after a couple of annoying instances.

There is a pizza slice joint next to the Wet Wizard bookstore. The pizza didn’t look very appetizing but I noted they had lasagna for $7.50. They said it would take 30 minutes so I walked to Cuppa Joe for an oat fudge bar and to the convenience store for some pineapple-coconut juice so I’d have desert and a drink.

The thing I learned about the pizza joint when I returned is that’s it’s licensed and icky. When you go in the food grabbery is on the left. To the right is an open area where lots of grody douche bags drink their beer and yell. It was difficult to read my Dungeon magazine without feeling like a chair might be smashed over my head at any moment. At least the ants were small enough that if they got in your food you wouldn’t notice.

Anyhoo, the moral of the story is that lasagna made at buck-a-slice type business are made out of cheap pizza toppings and if your stomach can take the punishment you still have your colon to wrestle with (picture that in your head).

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Truncheons and Flagons 4E

In the past three days I’ve played 3.5 edition D&D (granted with tons of home rules), Savage Worlds and 4th edition D&D.

D&D has never been my favourite roleplaying game. When I first started playing D&D in 9th grade, I immediately started writing my own rules system (Power Enterprise). I don’t pretend my teenage d30 system is any better than D&D rules in any of it’s various incarnations, but it wasn’t the fact that someone else owned the rights to the D&D game rules that made me want to make my own.

I have played D&D more than any other game system for the following reasons:

It has decades of resources numbering in the thousands, more if you include miniatures (which I seem to collect).
It’s far and away easier to find people who know how to play and are interested in D&D than any other system.
I do enjoy the tolkeinesque genre and there’s something to be said for nostagia.

I’m reasonably intimate with the rules of 3.0/3.5 D&D not because I’ve studied them intensively, but because I’ve been playing it for 8 years. Fourth edition has many changed/altered/streamlined/new rules from the previous version but it is still very much Dungeons and Dragons. If you don’t like the previous D&D rules, then this is bad news. If you like the previous D&D rules – any of them really – then this is good news. They are still convoluted, require lots of math, are made for cheaters, and are legion. Fourth edition D&D doesn’t seem to have any less bookkeeping than previous versions. I only played one game, and since I was a player I can’t comment on the claims that it’s much easier to DM. From my perspective, combat isn’t any quicker. The character who is attacking an orc will still take 5 minutes and the character who is lighting the lantern will still take 5 seconds.

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Running With Cake

I had a dream that I was in a marathon, and I was far enough ahead that I stopped to buy a cake. Once I had the cake, I realized that it may have taken too long. I didn’t have time to eat it so I ran with it. People started passing me while I was running with cake. Finally I realized if I was to have a chance, I had to abandon the cake, so I left it by the side of the road and continued running. I came in second, because of cake.

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Rate My Inks!

In my quest to make the awesomenest comic book that I can, I have been purchasing and testing a number of black inks. One of the laments of modern day comic inkers is that “they don’t make them like they used to,” i.e.: dark.

Here are my test results, I hope they are useful to you in some way.

***** Comic Ink by some company out of Asia possibly called Memory. Good luck finding this if you don’t live near Rath Art Supplies in East Vancouver. (totally rocks)
**** 1/2 Pro Art India Ink
**** Speedball Calligraphy Ink
*** Koh-i-noor Drawing Ink
*** Rapidograph Ultra Draw 3085
**1/2 Royal India Ink
** Winsor & Newton India 951
* Pelikan Tusche A Drawink Ink
* Higgins Waterproof Black India (totally sucks)

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Yay! Review Engine Calibration!

Remember Garageband.com? I do. And now apparently it’s back! I just got this email:

Dear MacBin,

Your song, “Burrow Your Way to My Heart”, was one of our best ever, having made it into the old GarageBand.com Final Countdown. The new GarageBand.com
has replaced the Final Countdown with an ongoing contest, and because of its
past performance, “Burrow Your Way to My Heart” qualifies for a chance to compete in the new system. Tommorow it will be entered back into the active
contest, in round 2, and will receive another 20 reviews and a chance to make it to round 3 or better.

We’re doing this in order to calibrate our review engine to historical data, and to give old TFC songs a chance at earning a higher ranking on the new charts.

http://www.garageband.com/artist/the_darkest_of_the_hillside_thickets

I almost feel like I should update the band member information.

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Yar Matey

Do you need a special program to burn DVDs or can you just take an existing DVD, drop it into a folder on your computer’s hard drive, and then drop those files onto a blank DVD+R?