Goblin Holiday

I took part in the Paizo.com Christmas sale. They had lots of books and items that were only a couple of dollars each. Unfortunately, the order was delayed due to them overselling some items, so I didn’t get my stuff until early January.

Included with my order was a Christmas Card with the following song:

Sneaking through your yard,
Going through your stuff,
Hope you didn’t like your dog; we got a little rough!
Tied him to a stump.
Lit the stump on fire.
Maybe you’ll wake up in time to put out puppy’s pyre!

Now we’re in your house,
It’s fancied up so nice!
With shiny things set all about, there’s lots to break and slice!
Here’s a stocking full,
And there’s a gift-wrapped toy,
For a bit we stand agog-there’s so much to destroy!

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

In a pile, Goblin style!
What could be more fun?
Breaking toys for girls and boys
Until we’re finally done!

When you wake, hearts will break;
Because we’ve had our way!
This is great! Let’s celebrate!
A Goblin Holiday!

The really funny thing was that the card offered a 10% discount on my next order, but the offer was void after 12/31/07. As I didn’t receive my order until early 2008, the discount was worthless. A “Goblin Discount” for the “Goblin Holiday”.

P.S. Later in January (unprompted by me) Paizo did give me a 25% discount on my next order, due to the delays etc. in my previous order.

Original Star Trek Online

Wonderful! CBS has posted the original Star Trek series online. Complete with commercials in the appropriate spots ;-).

The video quality is pretty good, but not great.

Link original from Jonah Goldberg at The Corner.

SpellTrack

I have been using SpellForge for quite some time. It is a wonderful program and I highly recommend it. With high level characters, who have a lot of spells (especially clerics), spell lists can get very long and unwieldy. In one of my D&D games I am playing a 10th level cleric whose spell list (as generated by SpellForge) using the Player’s Handbook and Spell Compendium is 9 pages long. In my last game session, it seemed to take forever to select spells.

To speed up the spell selection process, I created a spell selection wizard called SpellTrack. This is a simple Excel program designed to import spells from SpellForge and then provide a wizard designed to make it easy to select and keep track of spells.

Here are some screenshots:

Spell Selection Wizard

Spell List In Excel

After spells have been selected using the wizard, they are in an Excel worksheet which can be printed out or used to track them as a game session progesses.

While SpellTrack works, I have not done exhaustive testing, a.k.a I am sure there are bugs. Feedback is always appreciated.

High Quality YouTube Videos

Once again, the Lockergnome has a useful and easy to implement tip that makes my life more enjoyable. Chris Pirillo shows how to improve the video quality of Youtube videos on his website today.

Two options:

1. Add &fmt=18 to the end of a YouTube URL -or-
2. Edit your account settings (if you have an account) and set your “Video Quality” settings to always use high quality video.

I tried it out and it improved the quality of several videos in my favorites; they were actually decent quality in full screen mode. Some other of my favorites didn’t improve. Based upon Mr. Pirillo’s post, I presume that they were .flv video files.

Anyway, I switched my default settings to always the use the high quality video. Thanks Chris.

Ardivan’s Keep Map Moving Up In The World

My map of Ardivan’s Keep, which is basically a redraw of the moat house from T1: The Village of Homlet, has moved up in the world. It has made it into the Dueling Analogs comic honoring the passing of Gary Gygax.

It is certainly a step up, being in the company of the co-founder of D&D and God.