All posts by Brian A. Thomas

I am the father of Ari and Sidd. I am the owner and administrator of this site.
Gaming, PC Gaming, Portal 2

My First Portal 2 Level

I am a huge fan of Portal and Portal 2. Right now, until May 10th, you can get Portal 2 for $6.74, 66% off the regular price. Anyhow, I just made my first level for the game using their new Perpetual Testing Initiative. It is the first Portal 2 level I’ve ever attempted to build. I spent less than an hour building it (probably closer to 30 minutes) and about an hour tweaking it. It is a very easy puzzle, but I think mildly fun and not bad considering I’ve never done anything like it before… well that isn’t completely true, I made some Descent levels eons ago…

The editor is fairly basic and easy to use and I think it is capable of fairly nice maps on its own, though to get the full detail you need to use the Hammer editor, but for most of us I think the new editor is more than enough, especially as they add more textures and options to it.

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events

One of the key features of Guild Wars 2 is the dynamic event system.

Before going on, perhaps it would be helpful to see how most games and MMOs in particular work, for my non-game playing friends/family/visitors. Those familiar with the basics of quests can skip ahead. While walking around you may see a NPC (Non Playable Character) have an icon over their head letting you know they want you to do a quest (do something) for them. You talk to them and they will let you know what they want. More and more this tends to be voice acted rather than having a long text box to read, but either way you are normally given a chance to accept the quest or not. Normally if you don’t pick it up then you can at a later time. If you pick up the quest and fail completing it, you can normally abandon the quest and pick it back up again. After finishing the quest you will turn the quest back into the quest giver or somebody else, which could be across the game map.

Generally there will be several quest givers in a given area, these are called quest hubs. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Next Time in Guild Wars 2

As I’ve said again and again and again… I really enjoyed last weekend’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event. The developers at ArenaNet did a really great job of putting together a really terrific game. Not just a great MMO, which is in itself an amazing feat, but a great game overall, one that challenges standard MMO conventions, much to the chagrin of those that are used the more hand holding that others give at the early levels.

There are a few weeks to the next expected beta weekend event. Odds are it will be near the end of May, as ArenaNet has said they don’t have a date, but they should be about once a month. So what to do until then, and just as importantly what to do during that next weekend?
Continue reading Next Time in Guild Wars 2 →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

The Original Guild Wars – MMO on the Cheap

While I’ve been talking a great deal about Guild Wars 2 a lot lately, it may be a good time to note that it has that 2 at the end…

Like Guild Wars 2, the game doesn’t have a subscription fee. There is the original game, and three expansions, Guild Wars Factions, Guild Wars Night Fall and Guild Wars Eye of the North, which sort of bridges the game between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2… But you can get Guild Wars and the first two expansions for only $29.37 at Amazon (see link below). So for price of just one of the first two expansions you get all 3 and never have to pay a subscription fee. With the first game you get 4 character slots and two more for each expansion pack so that should be 8 character slots in the trilogy pack, add two more if you get the Eye of the North expansion.

Given how great Guild Wars 2 is, I wonder how many people who skipped the first Guild Wars went back and got it?

Best Deal:

Continue reading The Original Guild Wars – MMO on the Cheap →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Gamebreaker Has Seven Things They Took Away From Guild Wars 2 This Weekend

Gamebreaker posted Seven Take Aways From ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend, and the TLDR version is that they loved it. Obviously since they get to play games for a living, or at least in part, they spent far more time in game then I did and got to explore far more of the content. I barely scratched the surface and the highest I got my “main” was 8… I really didn’t get to play nearly as much as I wanted at all this time around, thanks largely to Real Life… work… kids… etc… Anyhow, on to more Guild Wars 2 news/notes…

They mentioned the confusion lots of players had, and how GW2 is very different than any other MMO. There is a mention of the overflow server issues and how some people had luck with one fix, and ArenaNet is looking into it, but do you want to be split and play or have everyone stuck looking at a counter until the map is ready… and it turns out the overflow isn’t for the world but for a specific area, which explains why I got sucked out of the city and into the foothills when playing, I was probably qued in the foothill overflow, crossed into the city, but the game never took me out of the que for foothills overflow. Unfortunately the bug reporting system is shut down as that still qualifies as a bug IMHO…

The lag was bad Friday but I was fine Saturday night and Sunday night… especially Sunday.

And the cities. I commented in one of my thoughts of the game that the cities were amazing… unbelievably amazing. They were proper massive cities, not just something you had to pretend was a city.

Anyhow, it is a pretty good article and makes many great points.

Get select items from this post:
Guild Wars 2…

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts

I thought of a few more things to add to A Few Hours In – Guild Wars 2 Thoughts and A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2. These are fairly minor and I probably could have edited the last post, but as I’ve been doing new posts each time anyhow… yes, yet more thoughts on the Guild Wars 2 Beta Event from this weekend.
Continue reading And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts →

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2

So this last weekends beta event is over now and I got a couple to a few more hours in the game. To follow up my first thoughts of Guild Wars 2 here are some other pluses and minuses I came away with from this weekend’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Event.

+ Huge areas, especially the cities. Stormwind in WoW should be like Divinity’s Reach here. The size of cities in WoW was a huge disappointment. SWTOR was better than WoW, but I really enjoyed Divinity’s Reach. Hoelbrak was cool as well (no pun intended).

+ Good server performance and little lag… well after the first day or so of issues they seemed to get things under control, that first day was tough… That said I see some people complaining about lag, so perhaps it was hit and miss for some. I think the key issue is picking the correct server, when the server list came up for me, the European ones were first though I live in the US. It should be local servers arranged by density then alpha, then out of country servers by the same arrangement. If they add Asian/Oceanic servers as well as US and European, then I am sure they could figure out which set to display after the local set.

+ Questing. I like the story mode quests, the heart quests and the dynamic events. The story mode quests aren’t as strong as SWTOR story mode is, but very strong none the less. No quest hubs is a general plus for me. It would perhaps be nice if there were a couple odd quests that could be picked up at odd points, but I liked the heart quests overall… of course one could argue that hearts and dynamic quests are just quest hubs without the normal quest givers…
Continue reading A Few More Hours in Guild Wars 2 →

Gaming, PC Gaming

My Noted Past in Gaming

Most of my life I have just been a geek blogging, or posting in official and fan forums for games, tv shows and the like, but I have on at least two occasions made a notable impact on the gaming world… well impact may be a bit of a stretch, but still was at least a footnote…

The first footnote, involves Shogo: Mobile Armor Division where I got thanked for solving an issue in their official FAQ (they have shut the official site down, but it is still on the Wayback Machine where that link leads to).

The second footnote involves the fact I ran a fansite for a game called Mortyr. Despite the fact I had no artistic talent and near zero coding skills, it became the semi-official fan site for the game and I got thanked in the game’s manual. I was in touch with the developers, and they gave me stuff to give away, which I did, and shipped at my own expense. The Wayback Machine doesn’t have Mortyr.net though so no linking to that oldie. I kept the site going for a short while after the game came out, but real life, and the fact the game didn’t do well in the market (it got panned more than needed, it was okay, and made some cool advances in the genre while is hindsight was a bit stale in many others)… plus the site was expensive to run so I let it expire.

I’ve been on at least two small closed betas which I count as being actually in a real beta. I’ve been in a few other “closed” betas that were near public betas that I don’t count, and of course any public beta that I hear about that I think I might be interested in. I don’t know if I had much of any impact in even the small closed betas there… so it is that Shogo and Mortyr are my two minor footnotes in gaming history for me. They might not be much, but how many ordinary non-game market people can say that at least two different game developers have publicly thanked them for their contributions in official material?

EDIT: Most recently, I tested Small World 2 for the iPad, and I’m in the credits of the game.

I also recently (May 2015) got in the press preview for Rebel Galaxy. See Getting an Early Look at Rebel Galaxy.

Edit February 2016: I was among the lucky people invited to stream Gigantic while it was still under NDA. As this edit is written, I have a few Gigantic VOD’s on my Twitch Channel (highlight 1, 2, 3 and 4 just in case they get lost behind lots of other highlights), and a YouTube video that is pending my writing a script.

Gaming, Guild Wars 2, PC Gaming

Playing Guild Wars 2 This Weekend

For those of us having Guild Wars 2 pre-purchased already, we’ll be able to play the game from Friday noon to Sunday at Midnight (all times Pacific). Unfortunately for me, most of that available time will be spent at work, but I’ll get some time in here and there. I’ll share a few thoughts after the weekend.
Guild Wars 2 is an Massive Multiplayer Online Roll Playing Game, like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic. But unlike them, there is no monthly fee. The game is also balanced and structured differently than most MMOs. There aren’t the usual 3 primary class types that all other classes break down into, that is, there isn’t a healer, a tank and a damage class, everyone gets to do them all to some degree.
Their intro video gives a good overview of what they were aiming for…

Then there is Guild Wars 2 – Mass info for the uninitiated, a good article about the game. The game holds lots of promise, we’ll see if they can deliver… this weekend is still beta, so plenty may change between now and the final release, but it should be getting close…
Continue reading Playing Guild Wars 2 This Weekend →

General

Hopefully in SWTOR Friday

Well, not that they fixed my pre-order registration issues (I still can’t post to the official forums, but that is a fairly minor annoyance at least until I get in for early access and won’t be a “real issue” until the game launches), I can look forward to Early Access. There was official word posted about the remaining Early Access times:

 Posted by: Stephen Reid
A quick update on today’s invites, and a little preview of tomorrow.

Today, we invited people who had pre-ordered up to the very beginning of October (roughly). Tomorrow, we’re going to be inviting the same number of people again; that will take us up to the last week or so of November. On Friday, we’ll be inviting even more, and we’ll give you an update on that tomorrow.

You’ll see more servers coming online tomorrow, and almost certainly there will be some queuing. That was always expected. As a reminder, our plan here is to maintain healthy server populations post launch, and during the excitement of launch that will mean queues. That said, we’ll be working hard to keep those queues reasonable.

We’ll check back in tomorrow with another update.

So people who ordered up through November should be in today (Thursday, 15 November 2011) and those of us who ordered after that should be in Friday (assuming that the invites go out the same day you can get in)… of course work will cut into that time a great deal, but Sunday I am largely free.

General

Farewell Old Friend

2 Comments

Today I said goodbye to one of my oldest and dearest of friends, Lisa Kohn. I’ve known Lisa since somewhere around ’95/96. We became really good friends, eventually she was one of my first loves… She wasn’t the first girl I was attracted to, nor the first girl I ever went out with, and we were never really a fully official couple so far as I know, but she was a very vital part of my life, and I am the better for her being in my life. I remember fondly a great many times together, running around having a good time, going to her parent’s home, or my parent’s home and on one occasion even taking her with me to Minerva for the extended family.
Just days before she passed, we had exchanged messages on how we would see each other again soon. I was looking forward to hanging out on occasion, seeing her friends and family again, and just remembering the good times together. She has been robbed from me… us… and perhaps this says a lot, not that she is simply gone, but robbed from us and that spot in my heart and mind that she occupied will now have to be content with just the memories, but they are good memories and they shall be cherished forever.
This was perhaps the second biggest loss of my life. Losing my sister was number one, and now this. It is sad to lose a grandparent or aunt/uncle, but when they have had such a rich full life, I don’t know, the loss doesn’t seem the same. Perhaps the fact that all those earlier losses were when I was much younger also accounts for it.
My dear Lisa, I hope you are happy and at peace and I thank you for every moment we had together. For all those fond memories. For helping change me into a better person and being a light for me at a dark time of my life. You will always have a very dear and special place, not only in my mind, but my heart as well. I morn your loss and celebrate your life. And while it pains me to think that we’ll never be able to hang out again, or I won’t hear your laugh, I will cherish all those times we did have together, and remember there once was a girl, a very special girl who forever changed me.

Politics

435 Isn’t Enough

Fun point. We have had 435 Representatives in the house since 1911 (with a 4 year exception when it went to 437). Our Founding Fathers wanted it locked in at 50k to 60k per Representative, we now have an average of 800k (source I am fact checking them now, however even if those particular facts aren’t true, their idea of more Representatives is a good one). NOTE: All that follows is a work in progress…I may modify it as I go along and further refine my ideas.
If we limited to the 50k our Founding Fathers originally wanted the size difference between districts would be less than 5%. There would be 6,000 members of the House and would far better represent their local populace. We could, if cost was a huge concern, limit it to one member for each 100k, this still results in 3,000 (or nearly anything up to say one rep for each 300k… no more than 500k).

With modern technology there is no need to have every member of the House in the building in DC… as a matter of fact, from a security point it is better, and there is nothing in the Constitution that would stop us from using modern technology to do it. And by leaving them in their home districts we could cut the expense of having them all in Washington. For direct representation in DC, if we wanted to continue to house 435 people in the the Capital itself, then each state’s legislative body and governor would decide who went to DC. Who went wouldn’t matter since being in the Capital itself doesn’t increase their voting power. If they wanted they could rotate so all of them get a chance, but to reduce costs perhaps best to leave it set. I would also suggest a pay cut to help with the expense of so many Reps, especially since most will be in their home district. At the very least a big cut to the size and costs of their staff and other expenses.

This does increase the difficulty of getting things done, since now you have far more people to sell on a plan, but in the end we end up with less pork, less ear marks and a government that is forced to be more focused on actual governance and more bills would become far simpler in order to get them passed.
Such a plan would greatly reduce Gerrymandering. It could be reduced further by devising a GIS based program to draw district lines without regard to politics… as a matter of fact, this should be done even if we stay with the 435 number we have now. That alone would improve representation.

We also need to remove the first past the post voting method in the US for all federal offices… I would say for state level offices as well. There are two primary alternatives, the Alternative Vote and the Single Transfer Vote. I would say for the House, use the Alternative Vote, for the Senate and President use STV. On the election form they are more or less the same, it is how they are counted that changes. Continue reading 435 Isn’t Enough →

General

Look Here, a New Dark Tower Book!

I love Stephen King’s the Dark Tower series. Perhaps his best works. Now a new graphic novel in the Dark Tower series is about to be released. Dark Tower: The Battle of Jericho Hill follows Roland and his Ka-tet on the run after the fall of Gilead…
I read the first few books in the first series, and it was really good.
You probably should read the regular books in the series first, then get into the graphic novels, even though they take place before the novels. Also that first novel can be a bit hard to get through, but after that they are a fun, fast easy read.
The graphic novels start with: Continue reading Look Here, a New Dark Tower Book! →

General

Our Crumb Cake Recipe

I have fond memories of baking with my grandma Thomas. We made cinnamon jumbles, cookies, and this crumb cake. The recipe cards always say “Olive Crumb Cake”, but it is supposed to read “Olive’s Crumb Cake.” As I understand it, Olive was one of my grandmother’s friends, and this was her recipe.
The cake is nice, moist and spongy. The cake sort of crumbles, but it is the crumbs on the top that give it its name. It is a wonderful breakfast cake as well as a snack cake.
Ari and I made this the other day, and I thought I would share it.

Ingredients:

  • 1 1/2 Cups Brown Sugar
  • 1/2 Cup Shortening (I recommend butter flavored stuff… I’ve used butter itself as well, but the recipe says Shortening so I’ll repeat what it says).
  • 2 Cups Flower
  • 1 Egg
  • 1 Cup Sour Milk (to make Sour Milk, pour 1 cup milk into a bowl, add 1 Tablespoon Vinegar and let stand for 5 minutes)
  • 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon Baking Soda

Directions:
Continue reading Our Crumb Cake Recipe →

General

Just as I Thought They Need a Movie About Rugby

I just saw a trailer for yet another ping pong movie, and then one for soccer, and I started thinking, I have seen movies based on lots of sports: all the aforementioned, golf, football, basketball, a few others, but never one for rugby. Oddly, the very next trailer I clicked at random on Apple’s Trailer site was for Forever Strong, staring Sean Faris, Gary Cole and Sean Astin. (Despite the All Black Haka style intro we see at the start of the trailer, shown below, the movie takes place in the USA.)

Watch the better quality trailer at the official site linked above.

General

When Covers are Better Than the Original

Johny Cash cover’s NIN’s Hurt.

Of the cover, Trent Reznor said:

I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps… Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn’t mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure.