Well, the whole pricing thing is keeping me up nights. The current model is that you get everything for one price. This is fine, if what you're buying doesn't change. For example, no one has any problem with paying 10 dollars for a book, because the book doesn't change, but this model breaks somewhat with my site because the book keeps changing, and new content is being added all the time (people who have followed the site for the last few months may disagree with that, but can we just pretend?) There's also the issue that people don't actually have the book; I have the book. (We could get into a discussion as to the relative merits of the a web based vs. a distributed application but trust me, it's not worth it.) Ideally I would like everyone to just buy the entire current book, but what happens when the book is 90 chapters, as opposed to the 18 chapters it is now (chapters=adventures for the metaphorically inclined, and once again for the nay-sayers, lets just pretend). And of course, there are going to be people out there who only want to buy one chapter at a time.
At that point, it becomes complicated on my end because I now have to track which chapters each person has, which isn't that big of a deal, but it's still substantially more complicated than the old model of one price for everything. Where it gets really complicated is if I try and combine the two models. Do people who purchased the first 18 chapters have those chapters forever? What if they pay for a year get 36 chapters skip a year and then come back? Of course, it could be that I'm making a novel out of a short story, but it's still giving me a headache.
As I may have mentioned earlier, I'll be at our local sci-fi convention this weekend. I imagine I'll have some pictures. Also, I plan on releasing the next Xenogenic NPC on Monday, and implementing the vanilla, diverse, exotic, outsider system, which I'm very excited about. Finally, if you're going to see "The Day After Tomorrow" read this review first.
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Ross
Long time readers of the blog will be aware of the long battle I have had with my car. I purchased it around the end of last year and though everything seemed fine initially, it didn't take too long for it to become apparent that something was wrong, not in a "the car won't work at all but we can fix it" sense or even a "just take this car out back and shoot it" but more in a "It mostly works but often does not and no one has any idea why," which I think you would agree is the most annoying of the three.
Mostly my strategy was to suffer through the problems and hope that they got bad enough for someone to finally diagnose it and fix it. Obviously not a great strategy, but it was the only one I had. Occasionally I would get so frustrated that I would give it back to the mechanic and let him take another shot. As you can imagine, on a car that's 13 years old there's no end of problems which can be found. Fortunately, (and this is the beauty of an old car) all told including purchase price I still got out of it for less that two grand.
I'm sure you're all now wondering what it finally was. Well it turns out that one of the ground wires wasn't connected to the frame. As far as what the problem actually was, you'll have to review my previous blog entries for that; at this point I just want to put it behind me... To close out, with I refer you to an excellent article at slate.com on executing hackers and the economics of human life something people pay far to little attention to.
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Ross
Well I'm still working on pricing, though the day is young, so there's hope that it will be done this evening. I am going to go visit my sister tonight in the hospital (the family crisis I mentioned yesterday) so we'll have to see how much time I actually have this evening. There are several unique features of this website which makes pricing difficult. In the simplest model, you buy something physical; paying the price gives you the item which you can then do whatever you want with. Even under a system where you bought an individual adventure (which is coming, BTW), you still do not get an actual product -- you get the right to generate a specific adventure, presumably forever. But it's still a lot different than buying a physical book, and that's the easiest scenerio.
The most common way for people to access the site will be in bulk. A single username and password will allow them access to anything DK has ever published for a certain period of time. In this case, you not only have to charge for the material that's going to be released during the duration of their subscription, but everything that came before. Then the questions arises: which is worth more, the old adventures, which are after all, old, or the new adventures which are of unknown subject matter? Then there is the whole issue of recurring payments. Lots off people seem to really hate the idea of having something automatically come out of their account every month or so, but it makes lots of things easier on my end so do I give people a discount if they're willing to go the auto pay route?
Anyway, obviously these are things I have to decide, but I will definitely let you know. As I said before, I'm still hoping to have it taken care of this evening. I realize things have been pretty boring the last few days. I did come across an interesting article. It looks like Patrick Stewart and Michael Clarke Duncan are going to be doing voices for a D&D video game. I think this illustrates how big video games are getting when the voice talent is approaching the stature of a movie like Toy Story or something like that. In any case, that's all for now.
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Ross
I revised most of the website tonight, though I still need to update some of the cgi sign-up scripts. I plan on getting rid of the paypal auto-renewing options, and I have to update the RPGNow subscription option as well, but I've been staying up too late recently and if I don't get to bed soon I won't get anything done tomorrow. The whole website thing probably would have gone more smoothly if I hadn't accidentaly deleted half of the webpages (I ended up getting one of the pages from Google's cache.)
I've started spec'ing out the next Xenogenic NPC (I'm planning on Monday). I'm thinking of four settings for future NPC's and in a global sense that would extend to the town I'm planning as well. The four settings would be Normal, Diverse, Exotic and Outsider. The normal setting would only allow races from the Players Handbook. Diverse would extend to humanoids like orcs, goblins, exotic sub species of dwaves and elves, etc. Exotic would be things like bugbears, gargoyles and even awakened animals. Outsiders would cover angels, demons, fiendish creatures and the like. Once I put out the NPC, it should become clearer.
I'd intended to write more but it is pretty late and I really do need to get to bed, plus there was a family crisis today which I haven't decided whether or not to talk about so that's all for tonight.
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Ross
I decided to do the next adventure in the Anyaka series as the next adventure (yes, it's redundant but I'm too lazy to fix it). Right now I'm shooting for the 19th of June, though that could change, possibly even move forward -- we'll have to see how time consuming this week's local sci-fi convention is, combined with the family reunion the weekend after that. One of the problems I need to get on immediately is to update the rest of the website. Much of it is incorrect or out of date (saying I publish three adventures a month at this point is not a good thing). My plan is to be done with that by tomorrow night. But that's enough DK news for now, what I want to spend the rest of my time talking about is nuclear power.
One of the leading green gurus has said that " Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation." Whether or not you buy the global warming argument, this is still very interesting. Renewable energy accounts for only 2% of the energy currently generated and Lovelock (the green guru) argues that there is no way that renewable energy can expand enough to take over from fossil fuel, and thus he argues that nuclear power is the only hope.
A complete discussion of the merits (and disadvantages of nuclear power) is obviously beyond the scope of my meager blog, but the numbers don't lie. Unless you are convinced (despite all evidence) that there will be a cataclysmic decline in energy consumption from unheard of and nearly insane levels of conservation (without a corresponding implosion of the global economy) then there's just no way that renewable energy can foot the bill. At that point, it largely comes down to a discussion of fossil fuel vs. nuclear and in that limited arena I think nuclear wins. Particularly if we had spent the last 20-30 years improving it rather than trying to regulate it out of existence.
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Ross
Now that I've got my mojo back, there's a ton of stuff I not only want to do with DireKobold, but desperately need to do as well. All of my time today which wasn't taken up by my 'real' job has been spent putting together a massive to-do list. Obviously, the first thing is to get some more adventures out. Xenogenic NPC's aren't nearly as cool, though once I have every class represented I think that will change. I hope to put them out at a pretty fair pace. Obviously, once a week is too fast, but certainly more often than once a month.
Speaking of adventures, I had high hopes of having the Midnight adventure out by now, but at the moment I'm waiting for final draft approval which is taking longer than I had planned on. As a result, I'll be starting on one of the other adventures I have in the hopper. I have one from Luke Johnson about a devil in search of redemption or I could put out the next installment in Wil's Chronicles of Anyaka series. If anyone has a preference feel free to note it in the comments.
Another thing I've learned through sad experience is the necessity of keeping costs as close to zero as possible, so much of my plan involves doing a substantial amount of the writing myself. This indirectly lead to the idea of the Xenogenic Town (the adventures have to be set somewhere after all). A town doesn't have a level in the same fashion as an adventure, but at the same time it doesn't make a lot of sense for the baron to be level three with the party's level 18. More than that, I'm hoping to have the option of generating it as a 'classic' town (i.e. only races which have traditionally been available for players) or as a 'diverse' town (Orcs and Bugbears mixing freely, though not frictionlessly with elves and dwarves). As I mentioned earlier, this concept is still in the 'research and development' phase, so any ideas are welcome.
Well, that's all the time I have for today. I need a nap if I'm going to be able to run the family campaign this evening. But before I go, I will leave you with the obligatory link. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Thomas Covenant books, but apparently Stephen R. Donaldson is going to revisit 'The Land' with four more books. Pretty cool stuff; there's even an excerpt.
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Ross
When I was growing up, we had a huge cherry tree in the backyard and in the fall (at least I think it was fall, are cherries harvested in fall?) my uncle would come over and he and my father would pick what seemed like thousands of cherries. After they were done, every flat surface in the house would be taken up with bowl after bowl overflowing with cherries. As you can imagine, during this time I was allowed to have all the cherries I wanted. I took full advantage of this year after year until at one point I realized that although initially I had really liked cherries, I now hated them. The same sort of thing happened with DireKobold.
Now I believe that I have already mentioned this (though not in quite these terms). I have already talked about getting burned out, about maintaining (by myself I might add) a punishing schedule of three adventures a month, about pouring thousands of dollars into a combination of the two most marginal aspects of D20 publishing, pdfs and adventures... And as a matter of fact, that's not what I want to talk about today, that's just the necessary introduction to the topic: what I want to talk about is my rebirth.
Yes, I'm as amazed as you are about it, in particular because I had forgotten what it was like to burn with desire (try not to take that phrase out of context), because I've always had been excited about DireKobold, but I no longer remembered what it was to be passionate, and then a few days ago, suddenly and quite unexpectedly it just all came back. Of course, being me I decided that the best way to celebrate was to take a day off before jumping back in (which is why there was no entry yesterday).
Now I realize that telling you that the business is dependent on my mood is not very professional, and I apologize for that and for the long dry spell. I did the best I could to not screw any body and I tried to be as honest as possible. Those lapses of honesty I did experience were mostly due to an inability to be honest with myself rather than a deliberate attempt to dissemble. Of course, the idea now that I'm 'reborn' is to is to never again gorge myself to the point of enervation (I slipped that word in because I wanted to link to a message board thread on D&D and Vocabulary and enervate is a word I am only comfortable with because of D&D).
As proof of my rebirth, I offer you a new Xenogenic NPC: Hadak the Artificer, a dwarven artificer (wizard). I admit that it's not an adventure, but it is pretty cool (let me just tell you right here that spellbook generation is a real pain. Also, I noticed that I don't label which level the spells are, something I'll definitely have to fix at some point.) Also, Hadak fits in with the city/town project which I'm embarking on. I don't have much to say about it tonight (it's already pretty late) but I will be talking about it more in the next few days and weeks.
I'd post the editor's notes for Hadak here, but they're pretty long and since he's available for both full and demo subscribers you should just generate him for yourself and read my brillant prose. On that ludicrous note, I'll end.
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Ross
Sometimes I'll spend all day surfing the internet and barely remember a single noteworthy thing. Other times, I'll check my normal haunts and within 15 minutes I'll have come across a half dozen absolutely fascinating articles. The first from Reason.com asks what the difference is between Kosovo and Iraq II? In the final analysis, as you might suspect, not much. Though there are various, almost inconsequential rhetorical shades which are interesting.
The second is on a subject I have mentioned before. In fact, I've even mentioned this particular research, but it's so cool I have to mention it again. I'm talking about the research on virtual economies, in particular Everquest, but also many other massively multiplayer games as well. There's some new information in here as well: a company that will convert one virtual currency to another, companies that scour virtual realms for deals and then resell what they find and the whole concept of virtual property rights.
The final article asks how Star Wars Episode III can be saved. His biggest suggestion which I agree with is that George Lucas should have nothing whatsoever to do with the movie. But my favorite observation is that Episodes I and II are what Ed Wood (most famous for Plan 9 from Outer Space) would have done with 200 million dollars and a talanted effects crew.
Okay, so nothing really original or creative today (from me at least) but I promise that tomorrow will be more than a regurgitation of other people's writing, or if it is it will be disguised better.
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Ross
Being in Arizona over the weekend has reminded me just how much I hate the heat. It hit 100 on Saturday and it's only May. Other than that the weekend was enormously enjoyable but contained very little to write about. Visiting family contains very little of interest for anyone who is not part of the family. Given the complete dearth of anything resembling content, I refer you to Ray Bradbury's Testimony to the President's Commission on Implementation on U.S. Space Exploration Policy -- good stuff.
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Ross
I was listening to NPR this morning on my way into work and they mentioned that Muqtada al-Sadr had called the decapitation of Nick Berg a fabrication. Obviously, the beheading of Nick Berg is a huge subject on which I have many opinions, but completely outside of the scope of this tiny blog. I am also 99.999% sure that the video was not 'fabricated,' but in this day and age of increasing technology, fabricating evidence becomes easier by the month. On the other hand, the technology for detecting fabrications is also quite advanced (witness the revelation that the photos of abuse by UK soldiers were fake.) So the question is, is it easier, about the same or harder to perpetrate a hoax now than in the past?
I guess my initial thought is that it's easier. It's widely accepted that horrible inaccuracies and lies are reported in Arab newspapers on a daily basis, but the perceived ease of fakery gives them something of an out. It's entirely possible that it's the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal that are full of lies (certain far-right pundits would have you believe that anyway) and it's the Arab papers that are presenting the unexpurgated truth. I personally don't believe that, but if you accept that perfect fogeries are possible, then it's only a small step from one to the other.
In any case, I have to board a plane here in a couple of hours so I better end here. Troy comes out this weekend. It seems to be getting decent reviews, but my advice would be to read the book.
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Ross
Tonight is the series finale of Frasier. This, combined with Friends ending has led many people to speculate on the death of the sitcom. I myself hesitate to be so hasty. I suppose it's possible, but then again anything is, so that's hardly a statement with much spine. I actually intended to say that I don't think so, that television is cyclical and even if sitcoms were on their deathbeds that a resurrection would happen eventually; then I thought about westerns. I was unable to find exact figures, but there were a truly staggering number of westerns on TV during the late 50's and early 60's. These days, with a couple of abberant exceptions (For example was Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman really a western?), there are none.
Okay, so sitcoms my or may not be dying and I have no clue which it is though if the best sitcom material anyone can come up with these days is to regurgitate Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett then maybe they are in trouble (not that I dislike either -- I just feel that it bespeaks a certain desperation when you're jumping back 40 years for material). Having gotten that out of the way we can move to an actual discussion of Frasier.
As spin-offs go, Frasier was insanely good. Quality of writing has always been excellent. The acting is extraordinary and most important, it has been consistently funny for it's entire run. That being said, it is one of the few shows which definitely jumped the shark (to be fair, most shows aren't good enough to jump the shark). So much of the genius of the show was Niles' infatuation with Daphne and once that was resolved, the show lost a big part of its appeal. Nevertheless, I'm definitely going to be watching the series finale tonight, though it's been a while since I've been truly impressed with the last show of a series.
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Ross
E3 is currently taking place. I've never been to one, though I imagine that it's similar to GenCon, just ten times bigger. The Washington Post had an article the other day about some of the depressing statistics currently weighing down the game market. One of the most telling quotes:
Of the top 100 games on the market today, only 13 are not sequels or tied to a movie, TV show or sports franchise, according to Jon Epstein, executive vice president at game Web-site operator IGN Entertainment Inc., which goes by IGN/GameSpy.
Of course, that's kind of depressing. I could see it coming, but I hadn't realized that we had already arrived at that point. In the article he also mentions Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, saying it was better than the last two movies. In a sense that's like comparing apples and oranges; in another sense the last two movies were so bad that it just about goes without saying that the game was better.
They recently announced that they were going to make a sequel to KOTOR. I read a preview of it in Computer Gaming World and it sounds pretty cool. Since the original game had a couple of radically different endings they are going to ask your character some questions in the sequel about how you remember the first game ending and based on that craft the game from there. A pretty cool concept when you think about it.
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Ross
When I arrived at work, Thursday's blog was still here waiting to be posted. Of course, the Murphy forces quickly came into play after that, and even though the computer had been up all weekend, it crashed within about ten minutes of me arriving... That's okay, you didn't miss much, though I did have a link to an interesting article on the merits of various search techniques. The gist of the article was that it was faster to find stuff at the library than by using Google. First off, the sample size was way too small for the article to have anything but the most teneous of statistical backing. Secondly, the author neglected to take into account the significant time it takes to get to the library in the first place. And finally, whether or not the library is faster or not, I would opine that it is at a minimum more authoritative. I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten bad information from the internet, whether it was a mis-attributed quote or an urban legend or political bile disguised as fact-based discourse, but I guess I should do more on the internet than read my own blog.
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Ross
Well, I went to my boss' funeral today and got some new license plates. Which means I wasn't at work today either, though it certainly felt like a day at the work since between those two tasks, that was the majority of the day. As you can imagine, neither of those two tasks is particularly suitable for writing about (what can be said about the DMV that hasn't already been said?) I guess now that my boss is buried, things can move on at work, but I think things are still going to be weird for quite while.
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Ross
As I was taking a nap today (days off are great), the police called. I am somewhat loathe to tell this story, because it once again illustrates that I'm an idiot. I got a 'new' car a few months ago. When I went to put the new license plates on I discovered that the bolts were rusted on the front license plate and I had to just cut it off. Which left me no place to put one of the plates so I just tossed it in the back seat of the car.
Since this was a beater I never locked it, figuring that neither it, nor anything inside the car had any value, forgetting that a licence plate is something very valuable, particularly to the kind of person who will just take something out of someone else's car. Which is preciesly what happened and why the police called. Apparently, someone had done just that (of course I hadn't even noticed) and used it in the process of committing aggravated assault.
So if I do get pulled over in the car (which, knowing my driving and Murphy's law will happen five minutes after I get behind the wheel) they will run the plates, it will show up as stolen, a swarm of cops will show up and I'll be pulled from the car at gun point. So... I guess I need to take care of that...
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Ross
I had a blog all typed up while I was waiting for some files to download at work, then something else came up and I forgot to save it. It's still there -- it's just I'm not going to be into work tomorrow so... I'm not sure what, but at some point what I wrote today will go up...
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Ross
Today was not a good day. My boss went into the hospital this morning around 8 am and by 10 he was dead, apparently from a blood clot getting into his lungs. He was definitely the best boss I've ever had and maybe the best I ever will have, and he was a good friend on top of that. The whole thing has been pretty upsetting, the suddenness of it all, in particular, but also the fact that he's basically the same age as my parents. They even went to high school together. In general I'm not in the mood to talk about it so I'll end here.
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Ross
I'm pretty enervated today. It's starting to get really hot, but I think that anyone who uses air conditioning before the summer solistice is evolutionarily unfit and should probably just be euthanized in a program that would simultaneously save social security and make the following generation that much tougher. As a result, I left the windows open last night. Fortunately, the rooster that used to live in our neighborhood has been beheaded and donated to the local KFC (wow, check that in an actual tie-in to yesterday's blog). Fortunately, I was pretty careful to cover my tracks, and I had plenty of neighbors willing to give me an alibi. No, this morning it was a fire truck that woke me up sometime before five am. Of course, it didn't help that I started playing City of Heroes.
I tried to be strong, I really did, but with friends at work pressuring me, great reviews bombarding me from all sides, and my congenital lack of a spine, I had to go pick it up. At the moment I'm trying to use it as a carrot, in the fashion of, "If I get everything done on my To-Do List I can play CoH." This has worked out okay, but eventually I'll actually make a to-do list and that will probably be the end of that. My co-worker has also been jerking me around somewhat. First he says, "Play on the Pinnacle server, that's where I'll be." Now this morning he told me, "Forget Pinnacle, Liberty is where it's at." It wouldn't be so bad, since my highest level character is only level 4 at the moment, so it's not a big deal to start over. I just wish there was a way to save and import a character model so I didn't have to take a screenshot to compare against...
In other news, I'm finally getting close to the end of Atonement. I just finished reading part two, which was set during the retreat from Dunkirk. Nothing spices up a neo-Victorian Novel like a war, so it's starting to go faster. Also, a co-worker just lent me the first book from A Series of Unfortunate Events series. I guess they're suppossed to be children's books (and indeed it looks like it will take me about 45 minutes to read this one) but I'm not sure how my daughter will react to all of the tragedy; she generally takes a dim view of things like that. I'll have my wife read it, -- having married me she has a deep empathy for unfortunate events.
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Ross
Before I got married I had my wife (verbally) sign a pre-nup. There were two conditions of the pre-nup: no sharing of dairy products and no sharing of potato products. In other words, it was not okay if she reached over and took one of my fries. In the nearly nine years since then, I have mellowed substantially, but the no potato product pre-nup has become legendary. Now that you have sufficient background, I can tell you a story from Friday's D&D session.
Friday was the 'family campaign' and we rotate who's in charge of dinner every time we meet. The couple in charge of dinner on Friday had purchased KFC (as an aside, the very first KFC in the world is less than a mile from my house -- it was just barely torn down and is going to be rebuilt), three buckets of chicken and a couple of things of potato wedges. My brother-in-law had gotten a plate of chicken and potato wedges, then he had sat down next to me, before getting up again to get a drink. Looking over at his plate I saw the larget potato wedge I had ever seen. It was like rather than slicing a potato they had just peeled it. It called to me. When I picked it up to look at it, the world momentarily darkned as it blocked out the sun. I exclaimed, "Look at the size of that potato wedge and promptly took a bite." My brother-in-law saw me from across the room and his face coalesced into a steel mask of pure rage, an expression so funny that the whole experience nearly proved lethal as bits of potato kept going down my wind pipe while I laughed to the point of wetting myself. In my defence I only had half, and then I gave the rest to my nephew (his son). And yes, you could quite accurately accuse me of being a hypocrite, but it was worth it.
Yesterday, I was in at work for eight hours while we replaced the UPS in our server room. The network guys decided that this was a good opportunity to completely redo the network cables. As a result, there have been all kinds of network problems for most of the day. My hope is that now that the quarterly publication date has passed and the web servers having settled down a bit, and I don't have something going every single evening (like last week), I can dig in and get some DireKobold stuff done. I'm still waiting to hear back from FFG for final approval on Wil Upchurch's Midnight adventure. But I'll probably start working on another adventure and assuming no great calamaties at work, I may have a Xenogenic NPC out this week as well.
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Ross