Ayleid ruins (amongst other ruins) make no sense!

Tv Tropes: Ruins for Ruins Sake

The entire page, and all the examples they put up.

Which one is your favourite?

Review Corner! This time: Germania by Brendan McNally

I don't know what to call this. Seriously, I don't. Is it an alternate-history spy-thriller or a butt-kicking Jewish psychic revenge-story set in the last day of the Third and Flensburg Reich? I have no clue.

Space Marine power armour and me

It's a love-hate relationship, entirely from my side. I mean, it's fictuous armour; what can it feel?

Valkyrie Diaries Fanfiction writing guide - Addendum

Because I'm a Grammar Nazi. That admittedly fails from time to time ::cough::typosinwritingguide::cough::

Taken: You can only incur the curb-stomping RAEG of this Grammar Nazi when attempting to write something that is srs bsns. I usually don't give a shit in chat rooms. Unless I feel like trolling. >:-D

I do apologize for the LOLspeak in this post. Been reading ED all day. Not good for your sanity.

Valkyrie Diaries Guide to Writing Fanfiction: Epilogue

Please! Listen to Captain Picard! For the love of the Chaos Gods! Please!

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part the last (10 and 11)

Part 10 below the fold

Valkyrie Diaries writing gudie for fanfiction: part 9

9. Humour is serious business:

Valkyrie diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 7 and 8

7. Plan your work, work your plan:
This is originally a battlefield adage, but it applies to the world of writing as well. If you know where your story is going and how you're going to get there in advance, writing it becomes easier overall. I have seen too many potentially good stories peter out into nothing because the author didn't plan the plot out properly. Not planning it out leads to loose plot threads and sub-plots that never get closure; these things will lead to a lot of disappointment amongst your readers and are known to start wars.

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 6

6. Novels are not movies in written form:

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 5

5. Past and present tense:

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 3 and 4

3. "Ing-disease": 
 
This is more to be considered a point 2a, but I think it warrants its own entry. This is a grammatical curiosity most common amongst English speakers from the Scandinavian countries, but it is getting pretty common across the globe. It stems, as far as I know, from a desire to put more action into the written words, culminating with the use of the -ing form instead of the past tense. It usually results in literary characters doing a lot of things simultaneously, usually a lot of impossible things. Use the past tense to describe what people are doing, and only use the -ing form in conjunction with the past tense, if other actions take place at the same time as the "master action" in past tense.

Example:
✔ "Officer Crabtree ran up the stairs to the door. As he reached the top he pulled out his revolver and, checking the magazine was loaded, prepared to kick the door in."

✖ "Running up the stairs to the door, Officer Crabtree checked his revolver for bullets and prepared to kick the door in."

Poor Officer Crabtree can't kick a door in if he's busy running, can he? Maybe he's a par cour master, who knows? It looks silly, nonetheless.


4. Writing for the ∫tage:

Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 1 and 2

Writing fanfics is fun, isn't it? It's cool to take the characters of your favourite show and put them through an adventure entirely of your own design. Yet, there comes a point when you must ask yourself: am I writing this just for fun, or do I want others to read it and enjoy it as much as I?

Golden Grey-a-thon 2009

Now this will come off as shooting myself in the face... But I have to get it off my chest.

So, this year's Games Day UK has come and gone and with it the mini-painting contest of mini-painting contests: Golden Demon UK.

This bastard has to burn

EDIT: I received a comment from Hanley himself (not logged in, but I take it on good faith) that he hasn't got anything against fanart as long as people credit him. He also very kindly pointed out that the Teclis one was actually done by Wayne England. I feel stupid for not having noticed...

Still: DeviantART has a strict policy against tracing and copying without crediting the original atrist. And the art contained in the army books are still copyright of Games Workshop Ltd.

Either way, the entry has been edited to suit this new information./EDIT

Okay, I'm for once mad. I mean it! I'm angry.

See, about a year ago, I called out a possible tracer on dA as well as reported the devs in question. Nothing has happen (wow, big surprise!), but the asshole of a copier/tracer still hasn't credited the original artists of his traced work. That's the least the mofo could do!

As a fellow artist I weep... silently...

If people hadn't figured it out by now, I'm a comic books fan. A dense one, that took a while before she realised what Watchmen were and I grew up on the comics from the mid-90s, what with the Spider-Man Clone Saga (which I liked back then, now I find incredibly silly) and Image Comics' Rob Liefeld.

Problems of the modern world: HDMI handshakes

So, having gotten myself a functioning PSN ID and all, I decided to download some demos for games I've been interested in. The first one was for Batman: Arkham Asylum, and that worked well enough (great game coming!). The next one was for FUEL.

FUEL demo installed. Play game. Screen goes fucking haywire. The colours kinda "inverted". There's no white colour. All white is black and all black, is well, still black. So it's nigh on impossible to see what's going on on screen.

After some fiddling, I manage to exit the game. No manner of sifting through Settings can change this predicament. I pause my Downloads (FFVII was available as DLC) and reboot. Problem remains.
As a side-note: I am so glad I had installed the winter-nature background theme, as the standard theme would've made it impossible to see anything.

What to do? Well, first, I back-up my game-data, in case I have to reformat the HDD. You never know, and I certainly don't want to lose my 40+ game hours of TESIV. LEGO Indy and Assassin's Creed I can replay, no probs. Same with Prince of Persia. But not TESIV characters.

I go online to check for people with similar problems, as Google is my friend.

Found this:



I tried that and lo and behold! I got my screen back. I had to switch the TV off, not just flit between the input devices (tried that). Turn TV off and then back on.

This is what is called an HDMI handshake-issue, apparently. Essentially, the TV and the PS3 don't understand each other and havoc happens. I'm lucky it could be solved this easily.

Still, it's annoying as feth!

NOTE: I have yet to try all my games since this problem occurred. I'm using ver. 2.80 firmware, but that shouldn't be the problem. It was distinctly an HDMI issue, as the box seemed fine otherwise, downloads continued but the colours went crazy.
TESIV seems to be fine now.

Games Day/Golden Demon Chicago bullshit

I have a bunch of stuff coming up, as I have said, but I'm just going to post one quickie first to highlight what has recently happened at Games Day Chicago ('tis the season of fantastic minis again!).

Apparently three minis that were entered (Warhammer Single, WHFB Monster and Open) and subsequently won those categories, weren't entered by the painter of the miniatures, but by a collector who had bought them off the painter. To make matters worse, the painter seems to have been in on this.

It's stuff like this that practically makes me fume from the ears in a comical display of rage and hate. It's keyboard-banging inducing. It just is one step below bribing the judges. Why oh why do people continue doing this and think they won't be found out?

Dave Taylor puts it succinctly at his blog.

One of the minis concerned.

And it's not like the case of the well-meaning collector who entered one of Aña's minis a few years back. He did so in Aña's name at least. This seems like regular cheating.

On a totally different topic: I have finally gotten round to reading Xenology. I recently bought a mic as well and I am thinking of doing something slightly different as far as reviews are concerned. Essentially make it an audio review. And no, I am not Yahtzee or trying to be: I'll be speaking slower.

A note on photographing miniatures

As a little warm-up on my intended blogs on mini-painting, or more specifically, colour schemes and what they bring with them, here's a few points on how to photograph your lovely minis. Actually, it more concernes the inevitable digitalization of them.

1. For the love of God/Allah/the Brahmin/Khorne/whoever!: DON'T save as JPG. Why? Because JPGs compress file size by "mixing" adjacent colours to a mid-way approximation, and they get worse the higher the compression value.
I don't have to say why this is a bad idea as far as painstakingly painted minis are concerned. I have seen fantastic minis, blurred practically beyond recognition by JPG-formatting. Sad, really.

2. On that subject: I know CoolMiniorNot.com has a width limitation (as well as a size limit), but it has no length limit to submitted pics.
Use this to your advantage!
If you still have to show HUEG pictures of your free-hand, link in the artist's comments to a Photobucket account or similar, where such size-restrictions aren't imposed.

3. Use a neutral background for your minis. And have good lighting. Preferably day-light bulbs. Curse you EU for forbidding the sales of ordinary damn bulbs from next year! I have to stock up on these now!

4. Macro is your friend! Don't forget to turn this on when photographing minis. Not everybody has access to a fancy system camera (although I am looking at a Canon EOS D40 currently), but most compact cams have a macro function. My current even has a special "Best Pic"-mode for miniature photographing. That's luck!

That's all I can think of at the current. I will now go back to my lizards for a while. You can follow that progress over at my Twitter account.

It doesn't get more WH40k than this

Ok, not the newest music around, but Bolt Thrower sure knows how to lay down a tune to suit the mood of an army. In this case, the World Eater Chaos Marines. The song is popular outside of WH40k-fandom too. The roar of "WORLD EATER!!!" from the crowd during the concert last time they were in Gothenburg was testament to that.



Grindcore/Death Metal at its finest and most brutal, IMO.

On open-mindedness:

Picked this up from Orac's Repsectful Insolence (wonderful place!). Answers something that has botehred me a lot in some discussions, especially with my two pet peeves: Intelligent Design-creationism and Holocaust Denial.

Game Review: Tales of Symphonia (GC) - Retrospective

This is a game I played a LONG while ago, almost four years. It took me around half a year to beat, and I played practically nothing else. The time it took was due to me having school to attend to as well as a social life to maintain, but that is neither here nor there.
So, after freshing up my memory as far as plot and characters are concerned (Thank you GameFaqs!), I sat down and wrote this little retrospective.

Game Review: God of War (PS2)

Brace yourselves for a tour through Bile-town, as I have some things to get off my chest after playing through God of War. Let's just begin with saying that an alternate title could have been "Overrated and overhyped". Yet, I have to say that GoW is by no means a bad game. But it isn't great either. It's a good game, despite all the horrible things I am about to write about it.

Format of my Game reviews

Of all the days to choose to publish this: Holocaust Remembrance Day. Political incorrectness, I am doing it RIGHT!

So, seeing as I am going to review God of War for PS2 in a bit, I felt it was an idea to write down the format I've chosen for my reviews.

It's all fairly simple:

Gameplay and Controls
Self-explanatory. Here I go through the game in itself; how it plays, puzzles and similar. I also go through controls, whether they are responsive or a flaming pile of arse.

Graphics and Sound
How the game looks and sounds. Nothing more, nothing less. Usually rated in relation to its platform.

Story
Also known as "why am I doing this?" or "why am I here?". If there's any kind f mythological creatures and such involved, this will get dissected here.

Summary
Pros and cons served up against each other with a final summation of whether the game was worth the hours it took to get through it.

And I will not give scores! Mostly because I suffer from a severe, life-long case of "cannot be arsed", but also because I think people should read the review and not just glue their eyes to a numerical score. Two games can get the same score on GameSpot from my experience, but have vastly different pros and cons.

This is more as an aid to memory for myself, so pay no attention to it if you don't want to.

The subtle art of miniature sculpture pt. 2

This is a sort of addendum to the last post, as I have had a think about sculpture in general. And a bit of an epiphany. No angry rant this one.

The subtle art of miniature sculpture

You might not have realised it, but sculpture, especially miniature sculpture, is a very subtle art indeed. And it is very different from standard sculpturing. And I am here to tell you why. Okay, I do not have any kind of actual education on this subject. All I have is more than 10 years of miniature painting to fall back on.

Here's the thing:
When you sculpt a miniature that is meant to be cast in metal or plastic, packed up and sold unpainted, you must take two things into consideration, apart from making a kick-ass mini, obviously.

Now this pissed me off...

Funnily enough, it has nothing to do with religious nuts, although there is plenty reason to be pissed over that right now. Let's just say that my religious nuts-o-meter went bust following the invasion of Gaza.

This is equal amounts of cute and sad---

The bird is cute, in all its meta-humour.

The owner is sad, in many different ways, for teaching his bird the Final Fantasy Chocobo theme.

And it's not just the Chocobo theme... Let it play out to the end, you'll see.