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drafts for 24 Avatars, for use on Moli.com

Printer down

Damn robots, always watering the printer...

photos 2

we were standing next to the flag on the right when the house exploded. Looks about 15 feet away


totally colapsed.

Photos1

Post

http://wbal.com/news/story.asp?articleid=65315

We were about 10 feet from the explosion when it happened, but thankfully Griff and I are both fine. Had we not taken a little longer at the post office, we would have been standing directly in front of the blast on our way up Hickory Street in Hampden. Judging from the amount of shrapnel embedded in cars and the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, that would have been lethal.

Our thoughts go out to those inside the house, and the many children next door who were not so lucky.

Gavin & Griff
Hampden

Explosion

It felt like an IED video... just a sudden, unexpected pop that sounded like a balloon. A very loud balloon sure. A black cat went running across the street, along with timber and glass. then a fraction of a second later the front porch buckled and fell forward into the yard.

I pulled out my phone and called the police. Busy signal. Called again, phone didn't connect through, shouted at others to call.

Holding a package, Griff is freaking out.

A number of men are running into the house next store. Screaming is coming. A few children are pulled out. An older woman. Then eventually a man from the house which is missing its front. He looks almost comical, covered in soot.

It's chaos, no one knows if there are more people inside, Griff is trying to get one of the boys to sit down. The back of his head has been blown open, exposing a 6 x 1 inch slice of brain. He trots off, unwilling to sit down.

The older woman, a grandmother of three, is frantic, unable to be clear. The men go back into her house, the fire trucks are showing up, then the police, then more fire trucks. it seems like an eternity before he medics show up. we're walking away from the seen when they do. Griff doesn't want to see what the firemen have found.

I returned later to check on friends across the alley. They are fine thankfully -- not there during the blast. the firemen have said the owner (the sooty man) had a propane tank on a space heater. Perhaps an O2 tank. The grandmother says he didn't have a working furnace, during a short sob filled interview on TV. He was trying to stay warm.

Very surreal evening.

Thanks giving card

Still going backwards. Here is the thanksgiving greeting card, following on the heels of XMass. This was pretty enjoyable to work on. It started as a number of line drawings taken from multiple pages in my sketchbook. Then I cut through the pieces I didn't like to get a composition that was 'okay'. Each piece gets colored separately, which ended up looking blegh on a whole (but lets each piece work as an individual icon, for shirts and such). So I dropped a low intensity coloration layer on it and it came together for the most part.

Halloween is next :P

Happy Holidays

Play

I sort of tranced off while I had surprisingly little to do tonight. Mobb Deep just took me away with him. When I awoke, this is what I had drawn... I have no idea what these are, but i kind of like them

Totally Gay

3:30am and I'm finally done. Ballot Bots and Dubious are both correctly formatted and floating in our printer's electronic que. The process was needlessly manual, but you have to love Adobe for making it that way... to be fair, I'm not sure if it really could have figured out all of the details on it's own. There's nothing like having to align 98 individual cards in their construction file
, then transfering them to individual, named and numbered pdfs, and then combining those pdfs into pdf binders for the printer to realign to their press specs... yeesh.

On the upside, one of my cats has gone missing, and i appear to have shin splits due to over-doing it for the past few weeks of soccer. Some what bothersome pain, mostly iritating because i think my cleats are the primary culprites.

8Bit Madness

Here are some new 8 Bit characters. Just some added fun for the growing inventory

Link Round up

http://sakoone.blogspot.com/
found object Robots

http://www.notcot.com/archives/2007/08/ninjatown.php
Ninja Town

http://peoplesdesignaward.cooperhewitt.org/2007/nominee/1114
everything is okay crime scene tape

http://i-delicious.de/
German artist with a nice style

http://johnnylighthands.blogspot.com/2007/09/indie-disco-lego.html
Indie Lego men, kicking it like scensters...

http://www.notcot.com/archives/2007/06/glooman.php
Gloo men, which are very much like Brikies!

http://www.notcot.com/archives/2007/07/colour_lovers_m.php
Wookies and Ass mustasche

House update

Radon work will be done in a week or two, followed by termite treatment probably a week later. That leaves a massive electrical job for us to do once we settle on the house (during which we will likely be camping out at the Royal street property). During, or perhaps shortly after, we will be doing the floors, any plaster & drywall repair needed, install cable or DSL, and then finish with a healthy layer of paint.

If settlement moves up 2 weeks, we may even be done for thanksgiving.

FACA 4

Vote for FACA card girls!

"Layzie Slawth" by Ted Mathot
"Fanny McRollo" by Benton Jew
"Barbary Anne" by Andy Ristaino
"Blackwidow" by Sagar Fornies
"Wartina" by Kristen McCabe
"Love Ginger" by Flaviano
"Hoopnotica" by Bobby Pontillas
"Erin Go BRAWN" by Bart King
"Priya Priddy" by Cal Wong
"MENINA DO'ANEL" by Dan Boyd

Chatter

I've been muling over Video Games vs. Non electronic Games recently. Specifically, why NEGs are harder to get people interested in and have lower social impact. BuDog inlet an interesting thought:

Its more perception than anything else. You can get people to play any of those games, its just that people frown on it in a certain age group ever since Magic rose and fell.
So you mostly have just the hardcore demographic still trying new games. You have to get them in the Pokemon stages.

Video games offer a lot more than board/card games can when considered as an object. To make card games shine you need interesting people.
That is the biggest hurdle. Some people really like tabletop games, but they can't find a good group to play with.

I'd say I find this true in videogames too. In that multi-player focus games can bite it if the players are not supportive to new players, interesting to play with, or 14 year old xbox racists. I suppose the big difference is that board games and card games don't usually have a solo option. And more over, since they are already niche, 'going to a new lobby' to find other players is harder to accomplish...

Wear more chocolate!

always upsetting to find a better looking website pushing an awesome product -- but also uplifting. check out these graffiti chocolate freaks: http://www.chocolatebarnyc.com/home.html

friday

captured from my desk. these are the most recent 8 Bits for use in Ballot Bots. Still can't parrot Colbert in 8 Bit form very well...

Ballot Bot men

David Lovejoy and I are hammering out the final layout touches to Ballot Bots. Here are 4 choices taken from my desktop that probably look the same to everyone else.

Top Left - the dark blue makes all of the background colors too dark. The white ring adds more contrast, which also makes the colors dark.

Top Right - works pretty well. The brown gives the background more variety, and the dark blue line work holds everything in its proper place. The darker blue in the upper field of the background may still be too dark.

Lower Left - nice and airy. Dropping the dark blue outlines and the border framework makes the background feel more like a space (the depth is more iconically believable). Still, it doesn't hold together as well, and all the 'air' makes the card feel empty.

Lower Right - this is the cleanest presentation, but the least interesting. If all suits are represented by one color, it is very easy to tell the suits apart, but is it easier than distinct multi-color treatments? The figures maintain a lot of the card's pop, but even still, is that extra color variety more exciting?

House is GO!

Our Bid has been accepted. So now we must get an inspection, finalize our financial agreements, and sign another 100 papers. All in all, November 29th is coming up fast and we look forward to it intensely.


While this means Robot Martini ops will be sluggish and/or a mess for a few weeks during moving, the significant increase in space will allow for more testing (and more testers), more social events, and better art production environments.

the details:
Two stories, 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths, living room, dining room, den, kitchen with tin ceiling, forced air, 2 car garage, wrapping porch, yard space, off the street/separation, all on 4550 square feet of property.

long week...

Still no word on whether I own a house yet. Spent much of today doing that, writing emails, and working on Ballot Bot card layouts. Also designed this for Emily later in the day...

Obama

Posted to Obama's website, per their claim that they listen to the public


"Your viewpoint on education is admirable, but the reality is the education system is fundamentally broken, and socially backward. Our cultural drive to make all student's "Reach their full potential" has been corrupted to mean "get into college". This is sickening, frankly, as it undermines the inescapable value of labor, service, and support industries, and promotes the view that those who's "potential" is not college related are second or third rate citizens.

When you address education, it is my hope that you consider a drastic and sweeping change to the system over all. One needs only to review the lack of basic knowledge in the american youth to understand that simply holding higher critical standards (based on test scores) is clearly not the answer.

I believe we need to culturally reevaluate the purpose of our education. Is it a vehicle to prepare citizens for "better" jobs, or does it help young citizens determine which jobs they enjoy and are good at and provide them the skills needed to achieve those jobs during their youth?

If it is a stepping stone to better jobs, we must acknowledge that those students who do not climb as hard or as high will hold 'lover value' jobs, and thus be of lover value to society, and should be categorically treated thusly. In this case, we have little to change, as all of our focus must be placed on testing, scoring, and ranking our students and placing the best into the best, most important jobs.

If education is a vehicle for children to learn about the greater world, their place in it, and those skills that they enjoy developing, and the occupations which employ those skills for financial gain, we must rebirth our system entirely. We must abort the focus on grades, as they have no relationship with the student finding a skill to enjoy. We must also expand our base teacher and teacher support system in order to accommodate the wealth of curriculum options needed, and to ensure that each student's voice is heard, and that their interests have an opportunity to be realized."

Weekend yeep!

Long weekend!

Got to see Greg and Travis on friday night, introduced to Travis' new fat / prego girlfriend Megan, chased a little kid around the front lawn (we had no tocquitos, so there were no wizard duels), saw a nice house on Saturday morning, decided to put a bid on that house, viewed an art show (home made / found object musical instruments. Tony Smith's turtle shell guitars were awesome) at H&H, saw Soul Cannon at the Brass Monkey (EZ, Ryan, Matt, and the other 2 I don't know are always awesome, but more so because they played new stuff that night), poked Todd's boobs, pinched Micha's butt, signed a bid for the house Sunday morning, went to the Raven's game (3 point win, sloppy retards have no shot at winning it this year!), great seats on the 50, right at the front of the shady side of the upper deck -- mucho thanks to Zeke, went to soccer, got laid out like a tool, home, feel like crap, went to bed (finally).

27 on 9/27/07

9/27 day is coming up again. we'll see how well it stacks up to previous years, which included such things as Pinyata Robots, Hand made cowboy hats for Dunnys, and an all you can drink Jager party.

Race War on GP

Fun, if not slightly silly racial debate (sparked by a video game featuring black colleges only) on GP. Some good, some not so good comments here: http://gamepolitics.com/2007/09/15/philly-games-writer-bugged-by-racial-comments/

upgraded

NBC fall previews

Watched three pilots from NBC's fall line up on demand cable last night. [spoiler alert]


Bionic woman is like Jake 2.0 meets BBC's Jekyl. The production values are decently high, the writing is hit or miss (generally unbelievable character responses, and poor pacing).
the Bionic woman is the actress from Jekyl. And she fights Kara Thrace from Battle Star Galactica (another Bionic woman). They aren't just machines though -- they seem to also be crazy 'evolved' creatures like Mister Hyde in Jekyl

Chuck was a decent mix of funny and action. It's their second Jake 2.0 rip off, and features an everyday joe (who works at a geek squad at a best buy) getting the entire NSA/CIA spy database downloaded into his head. The acting was better than bionic woman, and so was the writing. It also features Jane from Firefly as a NSA comando, who works at a best buy. The show will be pretty silly, but has its endeering aspects

Journeyman was the weirdest. It features the main character from Dog Soldiers and casts Kellerman from Homicide as his brother. The main character gets thrown back and forward in time, and tries to 'solve mysteries' each episode, while also trying to save his marrage... which is taking a pounding each time he 'blips' out. Good acting, good writing, nice 'heart' to the story, and probably the mot promice of the three shows.

the whole line up feels like they ripped a chunk out of the scifi channel. Bionic woman has 3 actors from Battle Star Galactica, (one was also on Firefly). Chuck has an actor from Firefly. Journeyman has the lead actor from Dog Soldiers (a scifi channel movie). The stories are all scifi too... from production values, to filming style, to actors.

Guess we'll have to wait and see if the public likes it or not

Getting up to speed in the slow lane...

I've been very 'meh' for a few days. More than a few days.
We've got three games working their way through development right now, which is good. Two of the games are pretty fun, which is also good. The website is coming along too, and the shopping cart error is now only happening like 10% of the time.

But I'm just not feeling the cat right now. Getting people to post/blog is a pain in the ass. Keeping the art moving forward isn't as bad, but it makes you hungry for faster progress. Talking to retailers and distributors - getting a lot of interest, but not usually at a price that makes any sense - fries the brain.

And i suppose the big thing right now is that we don't have a good lifestyle flow yet. Still haven't cracked the nut on getting to our clubs, getting the photos, and translating that to content for the website.

blegh

Bit Boys

Been crazy swamped with the Robot Martini home website, and haven't updated the blog in a while. So here's a little bit from my desktopI've been looking for something to give the site more identity and... well 'fun :)
I liked what i was getting with the Brikies, and in many ways their 3D nature makes them more flexible than the Bit Bots (working name), but something about their simplicity just feels right. The plan is to have them integrated into the user avatar system on the site... so depending on what your profile's race, alignment, gender and profession are, you would get a different BB.

I'm not super sold on the fem-design I've got here. I may want to tone the boobs down a bit (or at least offer that as an option). Some of the staff members will have unique avatars ( David Lovejoy's seen in the lower right ). Depending on Jery, we may be able to offer a number of character choices to our members -- maybe even different choices based on the member's "rank" (how many posts, comments, etc. the user has made).


like everyone else, I'm bummed about GTA4 slipping from the holiday docket (and my shares of Take2 dropping $1,500 in value). So here's a quick homage to Claude Speed of GTA3 (and a french soldier thrown in between for fun).

Wits and Wagers game show

a shot of the game show in hall E. good crowd, but my group lost pretty hard core!
end of the game show and everyone is happy. We left dom and satish as they quickly ate food and prepped for their next show.

Ran into Tom Vasel (spelling?) in the board room and had a good conversation with him, that I ended with an 'ass hole' statement i didn't mean to say (damn it!). Gavin "Thanks. ... I should actually listen to your podcast sometime..." Tom "... Yes you should." Damn it :P

Back at the hotel, can of soda, shower, blogging, now sleep!

Friday after 6

By 6pm (hall closed to the public) we were all pretty much wrecked. Satish stuffed a bunch of moldy sandwiches in my back pack and asked me to fridge them tonight. Dom and I joked about porn and having booze at the bar next year. we reviewed out sales figures -- we both did less sales today than yesterday, even though the crowds were larger (mysterious!)

Our day end was:

4 jetsetters
1 nerd trivia
1 inquisition
3 criminals
2 Tlip
1 Zolmh
1 bombshells
3 Get Bit!

which actually wasn't much lower in cash value than yesterday, but felt odd because the get bit orders didn't pick up. Lots of people seemed 'i'll get it later' ish in their feeling about it, though everyone seemed very happy with it as a product.


satish lets out a massive, earth shattering monkey fart and asks about putting porn in rule books. We're all happy and cracking jokes, but the guys are wiped -- they are doing even more than we are with 3+ game shows a day, and Satish's voices is almost gone by this point.


notes of the day:

Met a nice woman who teaches a grad program for game design in NYC. She seemed interested in having her students talk with us about the baby steps you can take from 'grad' to 'published'.

UK distributer dropped by and liked Get Bit. He feels like we could do about 90 units through him this year, though I'm not sure how that works into the first release. If he can hold on for a little bit, it would be awesome to produce a second run of get bit knowing 90+ units were already called for.

Dave Stopped in around 11'ish and there were no crazy pants, or wearing of crazy pants, which was releaving. I'm glad he got a press pass for Critical hits -- i had not known of suck things until yesterday morning when press pass wearing Mofo's were walking through the hall while we were setting up

Did a pod cast interview with some pod casting guys (I have their card but no memory of their names! Gah)

Ta Te Wu stopped by and asked to show us a submission later during the con

Steve and Steven stopped by and were the loudest most awesome demo guys so far :) It's hard to describe their awesomeness... they referred to the
swimmers in get bit as 'steves' and played down to the pelvic bones. I guess it was just a fun scene they made, and i miss having those kind of people around me.

Walked around the con wearing mister robot. got a hug and several more photos that i may never see on the internet. please send us links if you see them! I also danced with PikaChu while wearing mister robot.

Hell of a time, and sorry to anyone i missed!

Friday

Criminals demo (went sideways apparently). We actually got more than one demo of the game in, and people not only enjoyed the game, but bought copies. Must report back to John that Kory is now in the lead for sales (they jokingly said they were in competition over who's game would sell best).
Little more Get bit -- can we ever really get enough of it? We had a number of limb - injury players try it out (like this woman here). I wasn't sure how to respond to the man in the wheelchair missing both his legs, mostly because I didn't know how he would feel about the game, but he got a laugh about it, so al is good :)
back to criminals. the game got to heads up in the second round, and the "Trouble Shooter" got outed.

Friday morning cont

Fellowship of the Dice is behind our booth (the booth space on the otherside of them is totally empty). Nice guys that did a documentary on gamers and gaming. I hope i am awake enough to see the screening on sunday morning. It got a B+ on scifi.com so it can't be all that bad (a fear of documentaries about gamers). Both film writers and advertisement men, so they know a bit to start with. All in all, worth keeping an eye on in the future, if only because they are nice, and think my robot dance is funny

Friday morning

drive up Broad street to the "Cat Building" as Mecha has started calling it. It is a pretty silly looking building from the west.
Tsunami press' booth (behind North Star's booth). I don't know what to make of these guys... they don't have their game here, and the game they want to sell is a remake of the original space combat game (hex grid and cardboard unit tiles and all) from the 70's and I'm not really sure what market there is for them. It doesn't help that some very nice map making companies have booths elsewhere nearby.

Big dice seller behind us. Nice guys with some fun products (like asymetrical six sided vegas style 'clear red' dice). They seem to get a lot of attention and sales.
Expo seems smaller this year, and the tables help that feeling. Lots of space that feels like it would normally be booth space is just given up to free table areas. this one is to our north east. you can see the live action fighting stadium behind the booth the the palm tree (foam sword play)
map for a custom built war game, or custom map for a war game. not sure which. nice printing though, and nice graphic design us, if not 'hey play me' in feel ;)

CMS shots

these are all shots from the guys at Creatus Maximus . com. They;ve been buying create-a-man figures sans Get bit game for a few weeks and done some fun things with them. enjoy

People

Jesica and Christopher stopped by. They teach game design at the graduate level in NYC. They were very nice and picked up some of our games, and were very interested in having their students talk with us about "that first baby step" into professional game design and publishing

Bad ideas, just so good

Did some browesing this morning and came across an anime fighting game that uses books-as-character sheets. I can't remember the name of the game, but i'd seen some last year. The new addition this year was the straight porn book (all exposed boobs and suchs). It appears to be a best seller at that booth, and this got Satish and I talking about including porn in our rule books from now on. The down side: it will take you longer to find and look up the rules you need....

Day one is OVER!

(getting groceries from Kroger. 33 dollars for 4 meals for 4 people is a big savings over $7 per sandwich in the convention center.)
(Junk on the hotel desk. Day one sees $148 in cash sales. A 40 from Kroger helps get these updates finished, if not reduces the quality of the typing...)

Dinner

Get Bit shots

(crowd playing get bit. Turn out is good. we sold five copies of the game, which is good considering thursday is a slow / low attendance day)
(more get bit demos. mister robot is in the background. i wore him all over the exhibitor hall and in the CCG hall. Several visits to the booth from it. Several photos of mister robot by con goers. I wonder if we will ever see them around the internet...)

Couple of Dave's friends stopped by to say hi (I think these are the friends that hang around his ex girlfriend? I hadn't met them before.) Nice guys (not pictured) and I look forward to getting some demos in with them tomorrow.
(doing our demos on a medium neutral color was a good idea. the colors pop for Get bit, and the Sushi projects are much easier to photograph. got to remember that when we do new photography for Jerry's updated website)