Gametable Tests and Multiplay Scheduling

Well, I'm hungry too. But a few minutes in the kitchen with a bowl and a can of beefy veggie soup will take care of that.

Now if only I had time to run down the street and get some more Mountain Dew....

Anyhoo, where's SEAMUS? We can't transform and unite into the Megazord without SEAMUS, you know....

YaY

Three of four!

Megazord -.-

I thought we were the all great Mightygon....

Or was it Piccachu?

Naw!

We are OPTIMATRONZILLA!!!!!!!!!!!

Gazunteit....

*sniffles*

Hmmm... thank you, I needed that...

Ah, well. Devastator from Transformers is way cooler than Megazord anyway. Too bad Devastator's one of the bad guys. Or would that be six of the bad guys? Yeah, something like that....

Then again, our little gaggle's combination of awesome stuff and campy stuff probably qualifies us more along the lines of a Mighty Orbots gestalt, huh?



(Cool! The [youtube] command works on these forums too! )

LOL! that was soo cute!

I actually remember watching that show on Sat mornings...

Ah, nostalgia....

Do you guys know where Seamus is? I hope everything's okay.

Wraith wrote:

LOL! that was soo cute!

Considering that "Devastator" and "cute" should never be in the same sentence or idea, I must assume that you refer to Mighty Orbots.

Yeah, I remember watching Mighty Orbots when I was a young 'un too. I also remember having a weird fixation for Bo, who was the more serious of the two Mighty Orbots fembots; Boo was just a little too flighty for my tastes, I guess.

Wraith wrote:

Do you guys know where Seamus is? I hope everything's okay.

I have no idea what he's up to, to be honest. Let me fire up both YIM and Steam and see if I can maybe hail him this way or that. You're right; this lengthy absence really isn't like him.

(Here's hoping that he just coincidentally wanders back in and says "OMG, you guys are being a bunch of overemotional nancies" any second now....)

Well, he's not on YIM and is presently in Snooze status on Steam. I sent him a message to swing by here. But hey, at least we know he's still around, right?

True that and in the meantime, there are plenty of thieves and crazies to thump on.

lol!

my bad you crazy overemotional nancies....

stuff happens and i forget about my gametable responsibilities... crazy few weeks since getting fired and overly stressed out life as i was denied unemployment insurance (since the company i worked for counts absences as disciplinary problems that are about equal to theft of from the company (theft of company time???? i donnno) so in short i havn't had time for anything sorry

S.E.A.M.U.S wrote:

my bad you crazy overemotional nancies....

Sticks and stones, j00 l4me h@xx0r.

S.E.A.M.U.S wrote:

stuff happens and i forget about my gametable responsibilities... crazy few weeks since getting fired and overly stressed out life as i was denied unemployment insurance (since the company i worked for counts absences as disciplinary problems that are about equal to theft of from the company (theft of company time???? i donnno) so in short i havn't had time for anything sorry

Damn, it sounds like your last employer was a real pack of world-class buttheads, all right.

Where have you been applying so far? I hate to recommend an entry-level job after doing what you did for as long as you did, but any port in a storm. I've even filled out and turned in applications for McDonald's and Burger King, just in case nothing else pans out. I'd probably be hired already, if this sucky economy didn't have everyone scared and all the employers tightening their jobs because the Government's about to fleece them to the bone.

(Hey, don't blame me! I voted for McCain.)

But since you've already contacted your state's unemployment agency, do they have any program to help with online job searches? I know that Missouri does and Texas does, so perhaps your state government sponsors such a program as well.

You might also check out some of the hospitals in your area; some hospitals have job postings and job application forms on their websites. Hospital work is good, stable employment, and not every hospital job requires some sort of nursing certificate or medical degree; administrators and transporters keep a hospital running just as much as doctors and nurses do, and you might just qualify for an opening at a hospital; if you're drug-free and you have a squeaky-clean criminal record, you're good to go. Over the past two weeks I've submitted my application to ten different departments at Trinity Mother Francis Hospital in Tyler, Texas, and my chances of getting onboard are looking pretty good. It's incredible how many positions they have open right now....

Also, believe it or not, Craigslist (of all places) might be a good place to hunt for work as well. Carla, one of my on-again-off-again girlfriends down here, is getting a manager job at a Smashburger restaurant opening soon in Tyler, and she found that job through Craigslist. It's work a look, I guess; I myself have hesitated to try Craigslist because of the site's media-tarnished reputation, but they have to be better than the spam-and-scam fiesta that is Monster.com .

By the way, in case I didn't state it obviously enough, avoid Monster as if Cthulhu's own hands fashioned it from an unholy union of white-hot lava, nitric acid, live king cobras, Elric's evil sword Stormbringer and a case of highly contagious genital warts. The unstoppable deluge of unsolicited Phoenix University ads alone will make you want to rip your eyeballs out to stop the horrible visions....

Heyya Seamus! Absolutley don't worry about it The three of us kinda had fun anyway, just hanging out. It was good... and maybe one of these days Ainsley and I can have a power session for my chapter zero. *shrug* you never know

Anyways.... Good luck with the job hunt. It sucks that you have to do it, but good luck with it

Geeze.... smile a lot?

Wraith wrote:

Geeze.... smile a lot?

You couldn't help yourself, could you?

No, not really.

Also, I got a job!

I go in for orientation Friday at 11:00 PM and get off at 7:00 AM the next day, so I should be back home just in time for a Gametable hoedown...if we're still on for it, that is.

good jorb wids!

Thank you, Coach Z, thank you.

I'm going to be working the front desk (11 PM to 7 AM, as usual) at an RV park. The place is pretty nice...has a grand lodge, a heated swimming pool and a whole bunch of other amenities. And it pays $8 an hour, 50 cents more than I was earning at Chick's. I'm looking forward to this.

I got a bad case of poison ivy from cutting all that wood, and it's eating up both of my forearms. At least having a job will mean that I don't have to help Ken cut anymore wood (or pick up anymore poison ivy rashes) just to scrape together a few dollars. And if poison ivy doesn't exist Down Under, you Australians can count yourselves blessed. It would almost make up for all those fifty-billion species of deadly flora and fauna that roam Australia like they own the place, wouldn't it?

And back to more things that I shouldn't have been doing but did anyway, I spent some time today dinking with my Gametable lava underlays again. I admit it, the previous lava looks kind of weak, doesn't it? Part of the problem I was having when I made that lava was that apparently I didn't realize that lava and magma come in various forms, textures and temperatures; molten granite might look different from molten shale, superheated magma fresh from the planet's mantle looks a whole world different from cooling lava, and the presence of impurities in the lava (such as not-quite-molten marble, non-molten crude iron and molten tin or copper) might change its appearance as well.

Of course, I wasn't about to dink with all the subtle little differences between molten granite and molten limestone and molten lead and whatnot (seeing as I'm not exactly savvy to that level of chemistry, geology and/or volcanology anyway), so I just settled on hot lava and cooling lava. The hot lava is mostly yellows and whites; it's molten rock that has achieved that perfectly molten equilibrium at around 2,000 °F (1093-or-whatever-the-heck-it-is °C), and it hence has a more even and flowing yellow-hot appearance. The cool lava, on the other hand, is mostly oranges and reds; it's getting all crusty and chunky as the fringes and surface of the lava begin to cool, solidify and turn back into ordinary rock and metal. And the lava's cool enough where most of the impurities in the lava will merely burn (resulting in little puffs of flame) rather than being instantly liquified or vaporized. Don't let the name deceive you, of course; that "cool" lava might still be around 1,300 °F (704 °C), so don't go thinking that you can just take off running and sprint right across the surface...unless you're tired of having feet and lower legs, perhaps. And that's just if you don't fall through the layer of volcanic "ice". Heck, you'd have to be some kind of epic hero just to pull off a lava sprint and survive, really (either that or just cheat with some strong elementalist magic)....

As another innovation, you know those diagonal Gametable tiles that I use to make diagonal edges in certain types of terrain? Well, I made some more of those for my new lava, but this time I used various Warp Brushes to ripple and wave the edges for a non-linear diagonal edge. I'm thinking of going back and doing that to all of my diagonal-edge terrain tiles (starting with the water tiles, which sorely need it). And it lends a prettier, more natural appearance to the lava, especially if I want to mix the hot lava with the cooling lava (like, say, a fresh lava spring in the middle of a pool of cooling igneous rock and obsidian).










The obligatory Gargantuan tile: Here











The obligatory Gargantuan tile: Here


If only there were some way to get the tile edges to blend together seamlessly. But the illumination effects in these lava tiles are too squirrelly to allow that, methinks. *sigh*





What I'd like to accomplish next would be a set of "cold" lava tiles, where you have trickles and channels of red, still-liquid lava flowing through the cracks and separations of lava that has already cooled and solidified back into black rock and obsidian, kind of like you can see in this picture here. Then my lava-and-magma Gametable endeavor shall be complete.

Yeah, sure...I'm spending all this time making a heap of lava tiles that might only be seen once or twice in this campaign. But if any number of movies and books and comic books have taught us anything, it's that the best, most epic and most climactic battles often take place over a sea of lava, right? And half the time, somebody (usually the bad guy) ends up falling into it, getting picked up and thrown into it, getting caught in a sudden lava geyser spray or otherwise somehow burning up in the stuff. Sure, you could confront and battle the universally hated, utterly diabolical, dragon-sired Dark Lord Drake Grievous the Bloodspiller of Ages in the middle of a peaceful hamlet (which he's probably there to raze and defile, seeing as a guy like that has no other reason to be there), but where's the fun in that? Wait till he gets back to his magical iron fortress inside the volcanic flue of Mount Comehereanddie, like all the other heroes and rival villains do. Lava makes everything more epic, right?

Hmmm...either that or perhaps this campaign can sooner or later steer our party into the Elemental Planes. You know how in the four Elemental Planes, everything in each plane is made of that plane's respective element? Like in the Elemental Plane of Water, the "air" is water vapor, the "earth" is ice and the "water" is, well, water? I imagine that these lava tiles might work out for the Elemental Plane of Fire, don't you think? The hot lava might serve well as liquid fire, the cool lava might make passable solid fire and the air you breathe on the plane would pretty much be regular fire. The Prime Plane (the universe in which our party lives or undies) connects with each of the four Elemental Planes, and hence each of the four elements may exist and compose the various things of the world in the Prime Plane. Not so with the Elemental Planes; try to sneak a human or a fish or a fire elemental into the Elemental Plane of Earth and they'll be violently rejected by the plane, smothered or crushed or otherwise harmed by the native element (earth, in this case) until the intruder dies.

So in order to travel from the Prime Plane to an Elemental Plane, creatures must either use powerful protective planar magic to ward off the Elemental Plane's attempts to reject them, or use elemental magic to become elementals of that plane's element--equipment and all--thus avoiding being rejected by the Elemental Plane by becoming "acceptable" to it, through being transformed into the element which the plane recognizes and accepts. Either the planefarer can throw up an antimaterial shield and enter the Elemental Plane of Air as he is (which is nice for those who bristle at the prospect of magical transformations, though this approach will certainly draw more attention from the Elemental Plane's natives), or he can use transformative elemental magic to become an air elemental (with clothing and armor made of air, weapons made of air, spellbooks made of air with little airy runes on the airy pages, and so on) and breeze right into the Elemental Plane of Air like he belongs there...which, in a way, he does.

Come to think of it, I wonder how Corwin and Karnoz and Sylvea would look if they were turned from flesh and blood into humans and human wights and elves made of elemental fire. That might be pretty cool.

Anyway, them's my new lava tiles. How might I improve them, as you see it?