Ascius

ascius @ 2009-07-12T21:01:00

2009-07-13T04:01:31Z

3/30 Fragments of Val'anyr... if you don't know what I'm talking about, then congratulations.

ascius @ 2009-04-30T10:41:00

2009-04-30T17:47:12Z

Interestingly enough, last time I played a D&D game with the "roll your personal stats" motif, this is roughly the stat distribution I chose.

I Am A: Chaotic Good Human Wizard (4th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-12

Dexterity-14

Constitution-13

Intelligence-16

Wisdom-16

Charisma-11

Alignment:
Chaotic Good A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he's kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society. Chaotic good is the best alignment you can be because it combines a good heart with a free spirit. However, chaotic good can be a dangerous alignment because it disrupts the order of society and punishes those who do well for themselves.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

ascius @ 2009-03-18T15:45:00

2009-03-18T22:46:47Z

Not that anyone was wondering, but the reason I don't blog much here is that I've pretty much just gravitated to using twitter.

So let's all sing like the birdies sing, tweet, tweet tweet, tweet tweet.

blatantly stolen from my brother's tumblr log

2009-02-13T21:23:50Z

The big enemies of man are being set up to fall...

2009-01-12T19:15:17Z

Some researchers have found an interesting way to get the body to fight off cancer.

It's not the fabled "Cure for Cancer", but 90% success rate is damn good.

Tim Minchin

2008-12-13T04:52:06Z

My brother posted some Tim Minchin videos in his blog a while back, and I was rather impressed with his stuff. So I thought I'd share one I particularly liked:

You want a magic stay healthy pill?

2008-11-06T19:40:43Z

Well you can't have one. But there'll be a science stay healthy pill.

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

2008-11-05T19:34:01Z

Californians: Find someone who voted for prop 8 and tell them, to their face, that they are a bigot, no better than the people who tried to keep Obama out of office because he's black. Just because there's more anti-gay bigots left in California than anti-black bigots doesn't make it ok. They're bigots and they need to be ashamed of what they are.

Who will take Azeroth?

2008-10-31T00:56:45Z

Interesting visitor at work

2008-10-30T21:09:41Z

We have some hawks living near work, and one of them decided to use our atrium to pluck his freshly caught pigeon.

Unfortunately this is the only shot I got of him, apparently he didn't like having a person standing just a few feet away.

Fallout 3

2008-10-29T21:45:53Z

Holy crap. I could not stop playing. Fallout 3 is awesome.

Wassup?

2008-10-27T18:25:46Z

Weekend o' sleep

2008-10-27T18:01:47Z

I slept a lot this weekend... apparently the trauma of having my last wisdom tooth removed knocked me out for a good 15 hours. Even made me miss the start of my usual raid, which could have been really awful, as we'd cleared out most of Black Temple. But luckily a substitute left in time for me to take a spot in the raid's first killing of Illidan. (This is World of Warcraft stuff to those that don't know what I'm talking about).

Woohoo! I have all kinds of virtual accomplishments!

Then I slept pretty much the entirety of Sunday as well.

Oh yea, Web of Shadows is out, it has a wide range of reviews, from good to bad, leaving it at a thoroughly average metacritic score. Which is fine, I don't feel the ownership on that game like I did on Ultimate Spider-Man.

I've begun experimenting with throwing cans of soup into the rice cooker to make cheap hot easy meals... First was beef stew, which smelled really good for a while, but when I got around to eating it... the meat was blackened and there's not enough stuff with the rice. The rice is slightly colored and slightly flavored, so clearly we need a higher proportion of soup to rice. I'll pick up some other soups tonight, since I'm running out of soda again.

Which reminds me... when the teeth were pulled, the dentist told me no spicy food or crunchy food, and I got home and found that pretty much everything I had in the house was spicy, crunchy, or both.

Apparently I don't eat soft bland food anymore.

Also: Fallout 3 comes out tonight, I'll be picking it up at midnight and calling in sick to work tomorrow.

Vote the Cheerleader, vote the world.

2008-10-17T01:52:11Z

See more Hayden Panettiere videos at Funny or Die

ascius @ 2008-10-09T02:53:00

2008-10-09T09:53:59Z

Planet Fallout

Tomorrow's Technology Today

2008-10-01T21:25:20Z

Canadian scientist creates a CO2 scrubber.

I'm pretty sure most people don't think of machines when they hear 'scrubbers', but the term has been in SciFi for a while.

Death continues to be my favorite character

2008-09-15T23:41:33Z

Death: Humans need fantasy to *be* human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

Mmmm, beefy

2008-09-12T05:01:42Z

What happens in Vegas...

2008-07-15T19:55:14Z

...is you gamble a little, attend a wedding, completely lose track of time all over the place, eat any time you like, drink all the time you want, see the strip, and see a couple shows.

By the way, have you accepted hedonism as your lord and savior?

I for one...

2008-07-10T02:40:50Z

...welcome our new robot airhockey overlords.

it's a fricken laser

2008-07-09T23:12:26Z

"laser tattoos" interesting... certainly quick, I'd say it's more of a branding than a tattoo though. I wonder how they look once they've aged.

Huh.

2008-07-01T19:28:33Z

There's this guy named Matt Harding, he does a silly dance, he made a video that's pretty cool, you may have seen it before:

But not only that, he has a website about himself which includes some of what his deal is. I was going to originally post about him as a "look what can happen when game designers quit their jobs". But now I found out something slightly more interesting: I've got two degrees of separation from him, as he used to work with my current producer on a previous project.

Funny little world.

Heh... lighthouses.

2008-07-01T19:06:05Z

Teaching games are notorious for being unfun...

2008-06-19T00:21:29Z

...but someone put together an MMO to teach people the chinese language and culture. It's called Zon and I haven't actually checked it out yet.

Productive 3 day weekend

2008-05-27T19:05:44Z

And by productive, I mean relaxing. I slept in a lot, finally got around to finishing God of War 2, and didn't get called in to work on our alpha build.

Just updated my games finished list with that and Days of Ruin, bringing the total up to 380.

I tried playing Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and Metroid: Corruption (our 360 is red-ringed, so it's all PS2 and Wii at the moment), but I found them both to be too similar to their previous incarnations. Some old game mechanics can still be really fun with a new story, but often they're just the same mechanics with slight tweaks and a barely changed story... it's not nearly as rewarding to play the same game over and over again without coming away from it with something new. The Zelda games have been just barely riding that line of introducing just enough tweaks to keep the mechanics fresh and just enough story changes to make it different. You can still smell the old stuff under it though.