7 July 2007

What a gas...

I did some experimenting with Photoshop today and created some new Gas Clouds terrain pictures for ACTA, let me know what you think.  They're posted in the Resources page.

Tomorrow I have 2 slot zero games for the upcoming Palish Convictions, down in Tracy, so I don't think I'll be posting any updates.  Have a good weekend!

5 July 2007

Back to the grind

Updated Germany again, with the Graf Zeppelin class Aircraft Carrier and the K-Class Light Cruiser. One more should finish the German fleet, stay tuned tomorrow.

4 July 2007

Happy Independence Day!

Well, my friends and I wound up playing a bunch of WoW TCG last night rather than going to see Transformers, which we saw instead this morning at 9:45.  I bought tickets online last night, for an extra $1.25, which would up being both good and bad...I arrived at 9:00 and there was already a long line to get in and a long line for tickets, outside the theater (they were already selling tickets.)  This early, they hadn't opened up yet.  Having worked at a couple different AMC movie theaters while in college, I expected this on the 4th of July.  What they did badly first (yes, I'm talking about you, management of the Century/Cinemark 16 on Greenback, Sacramento, CA!) was not open the doors until about 12 minutes before the movie started.  This is a problem because everyone rushes to get  seats, and on a sellout theater, people get unruly when they can't get seats together.  It also actually hurts the theater because patrons are less likely to get snacks at concession because of the short time allowed before the movie starts, and pretty much the "instant concession line" formed by the aforementioned sellout crowd.  What they did wrong next, in their rush to get the crowd into the auditorium on time, was basically form two lines.  When you buy tickets online, Fandango in this case, you basically print out a page with a barcode which they scan to get you in.  Not all theaters have the ability to scan this at the ticket drop (where the usher takes your ticket and tears it), so kudos for that, but they have to print your ticket there also.  This takes a bit longer (say 7 or 8 seconds) than just handing someone your ticket and letting them tear it (which may take only 2 seconds.)  This doesn't sound like much, but when you have an auditorium of about 400 people, multiply that by a couple hundred times and it takes a lot longer to let in the line.  So, they had a second person at the front of the line who called for people to come up who "had regular tickets" not the barcode pages, to let them in more quickly.  This had the effect of pissing off the many of us who paid the $1.25 extra to make sure we got seats for our show and got there early, and were now waiting in line for the privilege.  after a few catcalls/heckles they quickly said that if you came in a group that one person could get the barcodes read and the rest could simply come in.  If they'd simply opened on time (about 30 minutes before the first show) a lot of the complaining could have been avoided.

There were a couple way cool trailers on the film.  I am Legend (starring Will Smith) appears to be some kind of post apocalyptic type of movie, and looks very cool.  I did a bit of research, and turns out it is a novel adaptation that has been done previously (Last man on Earth, 1964, and The Omega Man, 1971).  Looks cool, but the trailer doesn't show the vampires mention in the previous adaptations, so it might turn out to be cheesy.  The other film is a currently untitled film by J.J. Abrams, which according to rumors appears to be a Godzilla film shot from the perspective of someone using a hand held video camera.  In the trailer you get to see the head of the Statue of Liberty tumble past the guys house, so it looks uber cool.  I can't find anything on the Film Journal's "blue sheets" which would typically be the case for a film that has a trailer out.  So, its getting an unusually secretive treatment.  The release date is currently mid Jan 2008, usually a "dead" time for films (after the Christmas rush) so it will probably have the theaters to itself, and could be friggin huge.

Anyway, Transformers was way cool.  Go see it.  People clapped at the end.  Even me.  Megan Fox is pretty hot too.

Also I have another sheet of German ships up tonight, and corrected the spelling error on the Bismarck.

2 July 2007

Heeeeeres Jerry!

The first of the Kriegsmarine Victory at Sea cards rolls out tonight.  Check out the new card for the Bismark and Scharnhorst classes of ships.  If you have some well painted examples of ships you'd like me to show on the fleet pages (in a similar manner to the ACTA pages) I'd really like some nice pics!  I'm not sure if I'd prefer a group shot or single ships, but send me what you have, and maybe you'll see it here...

Don't expect an update tomorrow night.  I'll be out going to see Transformers after work!

1 July 2007

Almost...there...

Well, I didn't get as much done this weekend due to my game of "Rallying Point for Bright Sands" that I ran down in Fairfield running a lot longer than I expected to.  The group really got into the roleplaying of the adventure, and instead of finishing around 4-5pm like I thought, I didn't get out of there until about 10pm.  After an hour and a half drive back home, I was just too wasted to do anything on the website.  So, today, I've spent most of the day updating the site for August 20th (the impending release date of ACTA 2nd Edition) so now you'll see an ACTA2E button on all the pages for that.  What took so long is I found I had a small little formatting hiccup in some of the pages that I had to work out...it wasn't functional, so you may not have noticed but it was annoying to me.

June was a good month for the website, over 6000 page views by my accounting, or nearly a doubling of last months ~3500 page views.  It was the third biggest month for the site, period.   Site visits haven't been that high seen since the debut of the current version, when there were over 8000 page views.  I guess all the work I did on Epic last month paid off.  Well, this month I plan to focus on Victory at Sea, and try and get as many ships done as I have art for.  So, all you historical gamers, stay tuned.

In the last week I've seen "Live Free or Die Hard" though it won't be marketed by that name outside the US, as patrons from outside the United States might not be familiar with the reference.  "Live Free or Die" is the State motto of New Hampshire, you'll see it on all the license plates.  According to Wikipedeia, the phrase originates from a Revolutionary War hero's toast.  Anyway, New Hampshire doesn't figure in the movie much at all but its a fun movie to watch.  I did notice that there was some pretty bad voice looping in parts of the film where Justin Long's dialog didn't match his lips at all, presumably due to some re-editing to make things easier for the audience to understand the movie.  Yes, we noticed, Mr. Nicholas de Toth (the movie's editor).  Anyway, one thing I'd like to point out, is that one pretty big plot point is the traffic confusion created by the bad guy's software manipulation is pretty much impossible.  On every signal cabinet I've ever seen, there is an interlock in the hardware (not software!) that prevents a traffic signal from showing all green.  This was shown also in the remake of "The Italian Job", which I also enjoyed.  Most people wouldn't know this though so for the sake of the movie I was willing to chalk it up to suspension of disbelief, a critical factor in a good fiction story.  While you can manipulate the timing of signals, cycle length, green time, offsets, from remote locations such as a traffic management center (provided they're set up to do so - this isn't always the case) its hardly that widespread.  If you live in a small town far from a big city this probably won't be the case.  Most signals can't be manipulated anywhere but at the signal cabinets.

The other movie I saw last week was the third Pirates of the Caribbean film.  Eh.  It was pretty cool, great visual effects, but sometimes hard to follow from the numerous and myriad plot threads weaving this way and that.  Probably could have waited for the DVD.

Lastly, I do have something new for the site, a page of Speed Freeks.  Enjoy!