-+@ Resonate @+-

and that's not just because I've just watched American Idol...



Well, time to showcase more artwork done over the past few days - they have been blogged about previously, but not yet shown here on this blog so I thought it's fair game to show them here. From left to right, pencils by Hicks, colours by Nov, background by Holmberg. Image by Burke. Flower by Nov, background by Holmberg. The two Ploombs are TG and will definately go onto the engine. They Pheygrin is TW and might not see play at all. I have no idea about TW so far... well, that's because there's 3 sets that needs to be finalised before then, but we'll see what happens for that.

Zach (ZaCkO) is supposedly doing a Cald Hyren for a card, not exactly for me, mostly for himself. I wonder how good he'll be. If he's better than Nick that would be a good sign. Frank is also trying to get into the card design business - he's got ideas aplenty I guess, it's just that I'm more hampered by art than I am by ideas so we'll see where those go.

Slumber ends in a few days time and I'm surprised by the quality of some of the entries. This is going to be one difficult competition to judge. The MND tournament is schedule to start tomorrow and I know there are people rearing to go, so I said they could start a few hours early on the 16th after I've given the word to go ahead. It's going to be an interesting evening that's for sure, for some people. I don't think it's so much the free tokens as the chance to play competitively.

Talking about free tokens, my Sandwich Shop event is schedule to start in 4 hours time. 5 free copper tokens if they beat me at a game... which isn't too difficult to do since I'll be using starters only. The thing is, would anyone even bother to ask me for a game? I somehow doubt it. Kev has uploaded the new stuff again, which is good. At least we can read the rules and stuff. Ed has said he'll ask me for a game later, and that's a good sign... I think.

I haven't been working much on the engine really, although I should. MND and HumAliens should really get new cards added onto the engine. Perhaps tomorrow, definately not tonight. I know I also have to do the bold text for B5 as well at some point, but that takes a weekend of sit down time to do the tedious work of sorting everything out. I'll have to schedule in the time.

Mark asked me about Terminator, and I offered him the job of doing it as a co-Lead or as a full lead. I really have no idea when I'm going to start on them... just the other day I was thinking that maybe I should clip AvP first before I add Terminator. The plan was to get a co-Lead all enthused about the game to do the clipping. We'll see where that goes.

Martin is still doing the final tweaks on VTES and if I haven't said it before, I'll say it again - it looks nice. I also told him that the J, Q, K images were still not fixed on the engine... and the reply I got from him was that he thought that they were already fixed. Hmm... maybe the image server ate something up.

I haven't got any news from Kari telling me about his LotRO purchases for... the past 24 hours now. Quite a change really. He's already spent a bomb on it, money which could be better spent on other things IMO, but hey, it's his money and he can do what he wants to with it. I hope he's gotten better at playing as well - you can only blame your losses on weak decks for so long (and yes, it is viable to make a deck with very few rares and still get it to win).

I've been playing LotRO myself. Testing out Dwarves currently and I'm not too impressed with them. I've paired them up with Besiegers and that's a novelty these days - I'm more often winning with a shadow kill (against solo Smeagol, against dwarves, against rainbow elf/men/hobbits, but not against straight/gay elves!) instead of the dwarves running to 9, something which I was doing with ease before BR came out. I guess Orcs and corruption is just too much for poor Gimli.

I've also been playing with gToons lately, although I'm less inspired there, since there aren't any new cards or new strategies. I lost to a very good PPG deck just today, but won a shadow-match against an animal deck, only because I had the better draws. I got quite a few cToons as well so that's a good thing.

Thomas just asked me about the kit. It seems he's having some trouble with it. I told him how to do what he wanted done manually and he seems happy to do it that way. Well, unlike Martin, for me if Plan A fails, there's always Plan B, then Plan C, then Plan D, ad infinitum.

Talking about Martin, I've been meaning to do a nipa-Martin for Tony for a few days now and haven't really got on to it. So what have I learnt about Tony? He's a coder first and foremost. I'm surprised at how easily he's taking up coding, as if he's had lots and lots of experience with it. All I have to do is to explain something once... sometimes just the first line of the solution and he gets it almost immediately. Hence he has a high nipa number. However, he's not too good with the layout things and hasn't been using the interface to solve his problems... so TonyLuzzi n6M1. I haven't seen Craig's coding yet, so I can't give skandall a number. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

I don't think we'll get updates from Tomi for a while. He's busy sailing and doing other things like meeting Queen Amidala and Jar Jar Binks. I doubt we'll see DoA fully playable till about winter time. Oh well. I hope I'll get surprised, but like many things these days, I'm just too big a pessimist.

Well, 2 more hours to go for me. Have a happy St. Patrick's Day tomorrow.